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Surfing HalfOrc
2007-12-19, 03:50 PM
I (unfortunatly) see Fourth Edition going down in flames.

I don't see the reason for the new edition.

First Edition collected most of Gary Gygax's notes into a single ruleset.

Second Edition rewrote the game to eliminate the Gygax Era, and fix any number of problems. Then TSR went into a financial death spiral, was rescued and rebuilt by WotC into 3.X edition.

Now Fourth Edition is being rolled out, but there doesn't seem to be an overriding reason for it. Third Edition's rules work, for the most part (grapple needs a bit of help), but the changes proposed don't seem to be particularily WANTED by the gaming community, or at least the ones I hang out with. And nobody seems to be an overiding personality at the game company.

Am I wrong? Is there an overwhelming desire to completely rewrite the rules, reissue the entire game in a manner that isn't "backwards compatable?"

(I posted this down in the OOTS thread, but thought it was more appropriate here.)

Pronounceable
2007-12-19, 03:51 PM
To make money, of course.

ALOR
2007-12-19, 04:03 PM
money pure and simple.

Azerian Kelimon
2007-12-19, 04:06 PM
That, and the system starting to fall down. 3xEd's life was exhausted.

Thinker
2007-12-19, 04:07 PM
Its good to rebalance and reconfigure things every so often. When there is no more material to be produced for a given system this helps keep things fresh. Some people like new options (I'm one of them). This allows the cycle to begin anew.

ALOR
2007-12-19, 04:07 PM
That, and the system starting to fall down. 3xEd's life was exhausted.

really it still works for me, so does 2e and 1e. This was purly money motivated. But they are a buisness so it makes sense

Azerian Kelimon
2007-12-19, 04:11 PM
Actually, it was falling down. Once you can find a legal, nonsupercheesy counter to the edition's most powerful cheese, it's done. And once you find good homebrews for every single problem the edition has, you know it's time for a new one.

Surfing HalfOrc
2007-12-19, 04:14 PM
OK, we've got two, "It's for the Money," but that strategy has backfired several (hundred) times, especially in the gaming and software biz...

Sometimes an upgrade is good, sometimes it's desperately needed. But even if the upgrade is good, if it's not needed, it will fall on it's face. I haven't met a lot of people saying, "Dude! You GOTTA get Vista! It is the best thing since the internet!"

I WOULD like to hear from those who think Fourth Edition will be a good idea in general, rather than one or two things they like about it, followed by general bashing. I started D&D back in 1980(ish), so I've heard "New Edition Bashing" for 27 years.

I never got into Second Edition, but for an old 1st Ed. dog like me, I have to admit I really like 3.X.

EDIT: See what happens when you type slowly!

Azerian Kelimon
2007-12-19, 04:25 PM
Actually, Vista is, for now, craptastic. Nothing is 100% compatible with it, and it's less efficient than XP. Until we get a few SP's, it'll suck more than a black hole.

Mr. Friendly
2007-12-19, 04:26 PM
Because 3.x has serious problems that a new edition is needed to fix. Chief among them the hideous imbalance between Druids/Wizards/Clerics/Sorcerers and everyone else. Yeah, you can houserule the heck out of it, but there is so much to houserule that you might as well make a new edition.

Azerian Kelimon
2007-12-19, 04:28 PM
However, the power of a gazillion NG geeks/nerds is big, and just about every single issue has a perfect houserule in the 'net. Believe me, the problem is that everything has been FIXED by players already, and we need a new edition to refix.

Serenity
2007-12-19, 04:30 PM
The concept of a new edition is a good one. There are a number of power imbalances and exploits that have been catalogued on this forum alone that are difficult to really fix without significantly rewriting the rules. I'm sure that in putting out a new edition they are trying to deal with some of those problems. Whether or not they actually succeed is a point of contention that's still up for grabs.

ALOR
2007-12-19, 04:33 PM
OK, we've got two, "It's for the Money," but that strategy has backfired several (hundred) times, especially in the gaming and software biz...

Sometimes an upgrade is good, sometimes it's desperately needed. But even if the upgrade is good, if it's not needed, it will fall on it's face. I haven't met a lot of people saying, "Dude! You GOTTA get Vista! It is the best thing since the internet!"

I WOULD like to hear from those who think Fourth Edition will be a good idea in general, rather than one or two things they like about it, followed by general bashing. I started D&D back in 1980(ish), so I've heard "New Edition Bashing" for 27 years.

I never got into Second Edition, but for an old 1st Ed. dog like me, I have to admit I really like 3.X.

EDIT: See what happens when you type slowly!

I agree with you in the fact that I don't think they needed a new rules set. So really I think it's just a "wait and see" type of scenerio to determine if 4e will be an improvment on what we have or just something those who are happy with 3e will ignore.

Fax Celestis
2007-12-19, 04:34 PM
Because 3.x has serious problems that a new edition is needed to fix. Chief among them the hideous imbalance between Druids/Wizards/Clerics/Sorcerers and everyone else. Yeah, you can houserule the heck out of it, but there is so much to houserule that you might as well make a new edition.

Exactly. A new edition is needed because the existing system is beginning to collapse under its own weight.

Nerd-o-rama
2007-12-19, 04:37 PM
Actually, it was falling down. Once you can find a legal, nonsupercheesy counter to the edition's most powerful cheese, it's done.
You mean a DM?

Surfing HalfOrc
2007-12-19, 04:39 PM
Actually, Vista is, for now, craptastic. Nothing is 100% compatible with it, and it's less efficient than XP. Until we get a few SP's, it'll suck more than a black hole.

I know Vista is craptastic, my friend has it. That's what I was getting at with 4th Ed. :smallamused:

I get the feeling that 4th Ed is going to be the Vista of D&D, where people end up insisting on retro-grading the game back to 3.X. I'd like to see the balance of the game tweaked a bit, especially in the "Spellcasters PWN all!" sections, but overall the mechanics are mostly sound.

I'm still wondering about my "Why" question. In addition to the money, why roll out an entire new system? Is this going to be the model from now on? An entirely new, non-backwards compatable, system every 7-10 years?

Starsinger
2007-12-19, 04:40 PM
I WOULD like to hear from those who think Fourth Edition will be a good idea in general, rather than one or two things they like about it, followed by general bashing.

:smallsigh: I believe that's me. I personally think 4E will be great. There has honestly yet to be something I've heard about in 4E that displeases me. The change in the monster system? That's awesome to me! The class role system? Sounds great! I'm all for "Fighters can do this, Wizards can do that, and Clerics do the other thing." as opposed to "Fighters exist, Wizards and Clerics solve problems, and invalidate the Fighter."

Removing Gnomes from Core? Thank goodness! As to the common complaints that 4E is becoming too much of a video game (And too less of a rules addled mess) doesn't bother me either.. I admit I like video games enough that D&D becoming more like one doesn't particularly bother me.

Reel On, Love
2007-12-19, 04:40 PM
Ignore the "ZOMG $E" shouts.


Here's "why 4th edition": becase we've learned a lot about game design as a subculture, and because Mike Mearls and the other folks at WotC have learned a lot about game design as well.

There are a lot of holes in 3.5, and 3.5 is a fairly complete game. Instead of releasing new splatbooks like Tome of Battle to patch the holes, they went with a complete redesign and a new edition, which will do so far more completely. It's not just balance stuff, either--a lot of it is how the rules affect play, or simple fun (for example, existing trap mechanics? Not fun).

P.S. Whoever said that everything that needs fixing has been satisfactorily fixed on the internet is 100% grade A wrong. What's more, even if everything *did* have a good and useable fix on the internet, good freaking luck compiling it all and then getting all of your gaming groups to use all of it.


Edit: if you spend $100 on three books, and then you game with them for seven to ten years, I would say you have pretty much gotten your money's worth and far more.

Backwards compatibility would mean being stuck with a lot of the problems of the thing you're backwards-compatible with. 3E couldn't have made the progress it did if it'd stayed backwards compatible with 2E.

Admiral Squish
2007-12-19, 04:45 PM
I was first introduced to D&D as 3.5 edition. I haven't been a D&D fanboy long, and indeed, have only played one or two actual sessions of game, but I think 3.5 is a great system. I'm not connected, so I'm not entirely sure how 4e will work, but so far, it seems more like they're trying to pigeonhole us into set plans. Of course, that is a logical response to crazy degrees of cheese. (if you can't control it, get rid of it.) Though I have though the system to be a bit sprawling, like a plant that really needs a good pruning, I like that at times. But it's discouraging to those of us youngsters with limited budgets to see this mass of materials we have to have to keep up with the old-timers.

Person_Man
2007-12-19, 04:45 PM
WotC has essentially written everything that can be written for 3.5 D&D. There are a dozen different optional rule sets (psionics, incarnum, legacy weapons, horror, unearthed arcana, etc). The Complete books have covered every archtype and niche. There are 175 base classes and 782 prestige classes. There are numerous environmental books (desert, arctic, seafaring, etc). There are at least 3 different major game worlds (Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Eberron) and countless smaller worlds.

In effect, there's almost nothing left to write.

So WotC can either stop publishing, they can retread over the same ground over and over again (which they've already done a couple of times), or they can create a new edition, which will last for about 5ish years before they publish 5th ed.

If people don't like it, then they can just keep playing any of the previous editions. If they do, then its likely that we'll see even more support for D&D related products. I'm hoping for the latter, simply because I enjoy my hobby, and like to see it supported as much as possible.

ShadowSiege
2007-12-19, 04:48 PM
Partly money, partly it's 3.x not being a great system. It works, it's fun, but it's poorly balanced and has glaring flaws such as magic item creation. I'm very optimistic regarding 4e fixing the problems with 3.x, and adding a bunch of new fluff and crunch to play around with.

Edit: Also, hopefully they'll adopt K.I.S.S. for 4e so we don't wind up with, as person_man just said, 182 base classes and 782 prestige classes. I can only wonder how many of those actually get played.

Counterspin
2007-12-19, 04:50 PM
Yeah, I vote for 4e because 3e is complete, pretty much. Everything you need is now available. It's played out, so Wizards has to move on. Make all the analogies to software you want, but no one really knows how well it's going to sell. And frankly, I don't know why anyone in the community cares. I only care if the system is good. If the system is good, and WOTC is immediately consumed by a nuclear explosion after the release of the core books, I'll buy the core books. The success/failure of WOTC is not my concern, and I think it's just another way of slighting 4e without having to even take the time to decide what you dislike about it.

Surfing HalfOrc
2007-12-19, 04:52 PM
:smallsigh: I believe that's me. I personally think 4E will be great. There has honestly yet to be something I've heard about in 4E that displeases me. The change in the monster system? That's awesome to me! The class role system? Sounds great! I'm all for "Fighters can do this, Wizards can do that, and Clerics do the other thing." as opposed to "Fighters exist, Wizards and Clerics solve problems, and invalidate the Fighter."

Removing Gnomes from Core? Thank goodness! As to the common complaints that 4E is becoming too much of a video game (And too less of a rules addled mess) doesn't bother me either.. I admit I like video games enough that D&D becoming more like one doesn't particularly bother me.

But... I like gnomes! I also like half-orcs, bards, and several other things that are being eliminated in the name of "New Edition, New Rules!" :smallbiggrin:

I've played quite a bit, but I guess my players/friends are not uber-munchkins. Fighters in my games do serve their role: Muscle and Meatshield. Wizards DON'T survive long if they don't have someone who can take a hit and keep on hitting back protecting them. Clerics back up fighters and slap bandages as needed, rogues plug gaps in the skillsets the others lack.

There was an INTENT to the game that seems to be set aside to "WIN."

When they initially rolled out 4th Ed, I watched the videos. It was said that D&D would still be recognisable as D&D, but the more I listen and learn, the less it looks like D&D, and more like D20 Modern, with swords and spells instead of guns.

Cobra
2007-12-19, 04:54 PM
There is no need for a new edition. Just as there wasn't any absolute need for for a 2nd edition, a 3rd edition, or a 3.5. Groups can have just as much fun as they always had playing under the old rulesets. But I think most players would agree that the later editions offer a better ruleset to facilitate play.

I suspect 4th will be similar. 3.5 is much better than its predecessors, but there are still plenty of areas where it has issues. Grappling and stealth are just two areas of the rules that I can think of off the top of my head that have generated hundreds of confused posts.

I think Reel On nailed it when he said the game designers have learned a lot about game design. So far, each edition has been an improvement over its predecessor. I suspect 4th will be the same. The only real question is whether the improvements will be worth the price of the new books, but thats a question that can only be answered on an individual basis.

Fuzzy_Juan
2007-12-19, 05:19 PM
It might also be that as a company putting out a product...there are only so many suppliments that can be produced before you are just spinning your wheels. Only so much that can be done. 3rd ed put out a book for each class...then 3.5 put out a second book for each class...then a 3rd book for each class that incorporated some fan and dragon material (the complete series). They have explored every race, just about every setting, the planes, gods, epics, good, evil...4 monster manuals, several books with setting material, books of hell and the abyss. More forgotten realms and dragonlance..eberron...lots and lots of books...even several new systems for random things and the book of 9 swords.

So what would be left to do? For 3.5...pretty much nothing. To keep their writers working and busy, they needed new projects. Since most things were going online, they decided to make 4th ed with a focus on their online content and support. It also gives them an excuse to rewrite every single suppliment...possibly twice. People will be writing online content, offering support for online gaming groups...stuff like that.

Bottom line is, more money...but it is slightly more complicated...if they kept 3.5, then in order to keep it alive and 'new', they need to release new content and options. But, like all ongoing worlds, eventually power creep starts to become one problem and the shear volume of options just staggers people and makes new players shy away since nooone wants to feel they need to buy 20 books to be able to play the game 'correctly'. No you don't need to, but without it people feel they are missing out.

So, if they continue with 3.5, the already crazy power creep would just go batsh!t crazy and break the game wide open. The only real solution is to start over from scratch and rewrite the system. It gives them a chance to rehash some things that irk people while adding some other options that people kinda wanted. Simplification and more customization. That is kinda their goal and I think they might have something (looking at SW Saga).

4th ed was kinda necessary eventually, it is necessary now because of the speed that 3.5 material was released...to keep up with the 'standard' several books per month, they overloaded the system and then needed something else they could build on. If the books had not been so many, so fast...they might have been able to hold off on a new edition for another few years...but what is done is done. 4th ed will come and people will accept it or not.

Likely enough people will pick up the new core books if only to see what they are all about...that alone will drive sales and show the ruleset to be an initial success based on sales...which will drive it forward...the real test will come after the first year...will it continue it's surge...or will sales drop off into nothing. Only time will tell.

On the brite side...it willl mean 3.5 books will be on sale for 1/2 off and in used book stores for cheap. Good news for people who like 3.5 and 3.0 and will not be moving onto 4.0. Cheap books.

Alyosha
2007-12-19, 05:27 PM
I like the 3.5 rules myself. It was also the ruleset that I cut my teeth on when I started playing DnD.

Also, my groups are like Surfing Half-Orc's. No Munchin-esque players, and fighters and monks get to do things in our adventures.

But I do agree that 3.5 is exhausted in new material. I own several of the 3.5 books and most of the time I build my characters directly out of the PHB with maybe one or two feats from the PHBII or from the book out of the Complete Books that do my character the most help. But outside of that, I don't use many of the other books.

As for the 4th Edition, I don't know very much about it. But if the end product looks viable and I have friends who are interested in test-driving the system, I might at least purchase whatever core materials are necessary.

As for why Wizards is publishing the 4th Edition DnD, it could be that they want to make money and have no other motivation for publishing the set.

Perhaps they do in fact want DnD to retain some of its original essence but look more like a video game or some other genre of gaming to increase their clientele. The more the merrier, right? After all, the more people you can find that are willing to try your product, the better.

I know several people who play WoW or Final Fantasy, or other such Fantasy games and read Fantasy books, but would never touch DnD because of the math, the overwhelming number of rules, not to mention the fact that even the character sheet takes an hour and a half to hash out.

Perhaps with a redux of the system and a proper simplification of some of the rules and materials, more people will truly be interested in playing and something new, good, and interesting will come from it.

Fuzzy_Juan
2007-12-19, 05:47 PM
remmeber...if we want DnD to continue to be supported...a company needs to be able to make money off the product...in order for them to make money off the product, they need to be able to work on things and sell material.

Without that, DnD would devolve into an abandoned game, with no new printings, no material not produced by fans...it becomes a 'dead' game. Sure it might live on like players of Diplomacy, or those who still play the card game 'Rage'. But unless it is continuing to be supported by a company, it will eventually drop off as noone new comes into the game. Shadowrun was really cool, and so was Battle Tech, but when FASA folded both games declined into relative obscurity...once Fanpro acquired the games and started to put out new material, they started a comeback...but the same could happen to DnD if it isn't supported.

In some ways, that is kinda what killed TSR I think...they lost to much with their stuff and couldn't find a way to make it new again and gain new customers. WotC revived DnD in some ways...it never went away to be sure...but for a time, it looked as if DnD would never rise again.

I welcome 4th ed since it means that the game will continue to thrive and evolve, that there will be more gamers in the future who will play DnD. I can always stay rooted in 3.5 if things seem to suck, or even go back to 2nd or 1st ed...but It seems I'll like 4th ed...so I'll wait and see.

Caxton
2007-12-19, 05:59 PM
Yeah, I'm sad that 4e is coming out. I just mindbinded my parents into buying me 200$ worth of 3.5 books. I WASTED A SPELL!

loves_to_laugh
2007-12-19, 06:01 PM
I know that some things are being changed for the better-ness of the game. For example: grappling (as others have mentioned)and also turning/rebuking undead . I am excited to know that there might be a new and less confusing way to do turning/rebuking. The thing is that are those few changes (along with anything else they do) be enough to make the new books worth it? From what I know and hear, I personally think not. It's a good idea but I'm not about to get all new books just for some changes that can be house-ruled anyways.

Matthew
2007-12-19, 06:08 PM
Ignore the "ZOMG $E" shouts.


Here's "why 4th edition": becase we've learned a lot about game design as a subculture, and because Mike Mearls and the other folks at WotC have learned a lot about game design as well.

There are a lot of holes in 3.5, and 3.5 is a fairly complete game. Instead of releasing new splatbooks like Tome of Battle to patch the holes, they went with a complete redesign and a new edition, which will do so far more completely. It's not just balance stuff, either--a lot of it is how the rules affect play, or simple fun (for example, existing trap mechanics? Not fun).

P.S. Whoever said that everything that needs fixing has been satisfactorily fixed on the internet is 100% grade A wrong. What's more, even if everything *did* have a good and useable fix on the internet, good freaking luck compiling it all and then getting all of your gaming groups to use all of it.


Edit: if you spend $100 on three books, and then you game with them for seven to ten years, I would say you have pretty much gotten your money's worth and far more.

Backwards compatibility would mean being stuck with a lot of the problems of the thing you're backwards-compatible with. 3E couldn't have made the progress it did if it'd stayed backwards compatible with 2E.

*Laughs a lot*

Seriously, though, those are valid arguments and no doubt matter to a lot of people, but I suspect that the bottom dollar is money (see what I did there?), which is just a fact of the industry. I am quite looking forward to 4e, I doubt I'll buy into it, but it should at least be interesting to see what they actually have learned about game design and articulated in this new rule set.

Wordmiser
2007-12-19, 06:53 PM
The thing is that are those few changes (along with anything else they do) be enough to make the new books worth it? From what I know and hear, I personally think not. It's a good idea but I'm not about to get all new books just for some changes that can be house-ruled anyways. I think that the changes are going to be much more widespread than you do. From the sounds of it, the character classes are all going to work along similar mechanics in order to better balance the game setting. That's much more drastic than a Turn Undead/Grapple rewrite; it's an entirely new system.

jayphonic
2007-12-19, 06:55 PM
Moving beyond 3.5 is a natural progression. As a designer who doesn't want to fix what they see as errors in a design?

Here is a big one: Elimination of the 5 minute day in D&D. I have always hated the cycle of boom and bust that happens in a few CR appropriate encounters. "Oops, all our spells are gone, time to rest."

4e promises to allow parties to continue to adventure even when they are "low" on their most powerful abilities.

How about scalability? We all have played D&D in the sweet spot (levels 5-12) generally things break down after that. Now they are promising a system that scales as a party levels. Sounds good to me.

Greenfaun
2007-12-19, 06:58 PM
Well, I admit that in my youth I was a rabid anti-D&D pro-GURPS and white wolf gamer. That was back in 2nd Ed. When 3rd edition came out, I tried it, it was clearly better, but it still didn't grab me. Then, Eberron grabbed me, and OOTS grabbed me, and between the two I've found out more about D&D than someone who's only spent about 50 hours in his life actually playing it should know. Apparently it's not enough to enjoy playing it, though.

I'm hoping 4th Edition will finally be a D&D I can like. The designers' stated goals, things like "All class balance is in-combat balance" and "The sweet spot should last all 30 levels" fill me with hope. The "party roles" scheme seems like a way to make classes matter without being so complicated and without unintentionally gimping hybrid or fence-sitter classes.

Their willingness to kill all sorts of sacred cows (playable races, class lists, power curves, vancian magic) shows the kind of boldness that could create a great new system. Or it could just be egos run amok, and 4E will have a whole new set of problems. We won't know until it comes out, but I'm hopeful.

Reel On, Love
2007-12-19, 08:08 PM
Yeah, I'm sad that 4e is coming out. I just mindbinded my parents into buying me 200$ worth of 3.5 books. I WASTED A SPELL!

You don't want to be Elfstar anymore, you want to be Debbie?


I know that some things are being changed for the better-ness of the game. For example: grappling (as others have mentioned)and also turning/rebuking undead . I am excited to know that there might be a new and less confusing way to do turning/rebuking. The thing is that are those few changes (along with anything else they do) be enough to make the new books worth it? From what I know and hear, I personally think not. It's a good idea but I'm not about to get all new books just for some changes that can be house-ruled anyways.

The changes are a lot more far-reaching than that. If it could be done with a few simple house rules, it would be.



*Laughs a lot*

Seriously, though, those are valid arguments and no doubt matter to a lot of people, but I suspect that the bottom dollar is money (see what I did there?), which is just a fact of the industry. I am quite looking forward to 4e, I doubt I'll buy into it, but it should at least be interesting to see what they actually have learned about game design and articulated in this new rule set.

Of course money is a factor--what company doesn't want to make money? These things are more complicated than that, though. There's rhyme and reason behind the decision to make money via a new edition rather than make money with more books.

purple gelatinous cube o' Doom
2007-12-19, 08:27 PM
To answer the question asked, the almighty dollar is why there's going to be 4th Ed. so soon.


Yeah, I'm sad that 4e is coming out. I just mindbinded my parents into buying me 200$ worth of 3.5 books. I WASTED A SPELL!

Caxton, I actually disagree with you. yes there will be those people who will rush out and get the 4th ed. stuff when it comes out, but I believe that the majority of people will stick with 3.5 for a while after the new edition is released. I for one, and not going to get the 4th ed. stuff for quite a while. One, I'm not playing quite as much as I was so getting the new edition wouldn't be a good investment for me, and second, there are still a lot of 3.5 books I would like to get. I find ebay is a great place to get book for real cheap, new or used.

Matthew
2007-12-19, 08:36 PM
Of course money is a factor--what company doesn't want to make money? These things are more complicated than that, though. There's rhyme and reason behind the decision to make money via a new edition rather than make money with more books.

Sure, there's rhyme and reason, but it's not that money is just a factor, it's the bottom line with any company. They're looking at the most profitable time to release a new edition and they've been developing this one for a number of years. Wizards would be remiss to not start on fifth edition a year or two after releasing fourth edition, in my opinion; it just makes good business sense to be developing a new edition in the background. The answer to why there is going to be a fourth edition is 'money', that's not a criticism, it's just a fact. The form that fourth edition takes, however, is not quite as money motivated (though to a large extent, appealing to a broad a fan base as possible is about money and market domination).

Fhaolan
2007-12-19, 09:09 PM
As Matthew says, it's all about money. Or, possibly to be more precise, it's about *profit*.

You see, every publication has a cost to produce. Writing, editing, printing, distribution. The writing and editing costs tend to be fixed per product, but the printing and distribution costs vary by the units (individual books of that product) put on the market. The more units produced, the more the printing and distribution costs go up, but the less those costs are per unit because of the economy of scale.

Which means there's a break even point. A point where if you don't sell enough units of a specific book, that book is not actually worth publishing. No matter how interesting, or wonderful, or well balanced, or whateer, if you don't sell enough units of that book, it's not a profit, it's a loss.

Inexperienced, or foolish, publishers will misunderstand the economy of scale and will attempt to flood the market with many *different* books, thinking that units are units. The fact that each unit requires a different print line (and therefore dosn't gain the economy of scale benefit), is a complete surprise to them.

Add in the fact that the more specialized a book is, the smaller the market is. Producing several specialized books, rather than one general book, doesn't mean you increase the audience, you just split that audience into smaller chunks. All D&D players are interested in the PHB. Only a subset of those players are interested in The Dragons of Eberron. And there is almost nobody who is interested in the Dragons of Eberron, who isn't interested in the PHB. They didn't increase the market with the specialized book, they just sold to a subset. Which means there will be fewer purchased units of the specialized book relative to the generalized book.

This is what killed TSR. They flooded the market with narrowly specialized books and truely published themselve to death. They were bankrupt. Done. Dead in the water. There was never going to be enough sales of any new 2nd edition product to salvage D&D.

So we got 3rd. And when 3rd's market power ran out, we got 3.5. Now we're getting 4th. And hopefully there will be a 5th. Because as long as they're pushing out new editions, it means that D&D is alive.

Otherwise, D&D is as dead as Latin.

Azerian Kelimon
2007-12-19, 09:17 PM
Don't ever forget that the accountant's definition of profit (Which is more or less the one you mention) forgets the biggest profit of all, which is succeeding on a task you have place upon yourself. Many smash hits have been done because the person who thinked up the idea carried it through good and bad (Perfect example, though it's not D&D: Apocalypse Now), and refused to give up until it was published.

holywhippet
2007-12-19, 09:23 PM
I don't view 4th edition so much as a replacement as a new flavour. It's like complaining about a new flavour of ice cream. I suspect it will get decent sales - the DM for my current campaign really likes based on what he's seen of Star Wars Saga edition.

Cutting ties and starting afresh is a good move as they can apply what they've learned over the years. Sometimes the best thing to do is to throw everything you've done away and start afresh.

Timespike
2007-12-19, 09:45 PM
You know it's interesting; one of the factors that's made me like 3.5 so much is the OGL. I make EXTENSIVE use of Green Ronin, Privateer Press, Paizo, and Malhavoc Press material in my homebrew setting. Really extensive. "Take all the third party stuff out and the setting's not itself anymore" extensive.

Green Ronin is backing out of the D&D compatible market with the assistance of NOS and Malhavoc has shut down. Privateer Press is still publishing, but who knows if WotC will even let them license the Iron Kingdoms to be compatible with 4E? I'm nowhere NEAR done telling stories in that setting. Even if I wind up liking 4E (and I may very well; I don't intend to make any sort of judgment until I get my hands on the three cores & read 'em), that's a sticky problem. Because once you've done fantasy with all the extras (steampunk, psionics, alternate magic systems, etc.) the plain version just doesn't cut it any more. WotC seems pretty adverse to the idea of releasing steampunk material which I just plain don't get. We've got the Iron Kingdoms, Spirosblaak, Warcraft, Sorcery & Steam, OGL Steampunk, DragonMech, Ptolus, and a number of PDF-Only steampunk products. Spirosblaak, DragonMech, and the Iron Kingdoms all have multiple supplements on top of the core book. There JUST A LITTLE BIT of demand for steampunk as evidenced by all of this. Does WotC publish a steampunk setting, supplement, or ANYthing? No. The closest they've gotten was an article on guns during the Paizo era of Dragon, which means that it wasn't them in the first place, even if it had the D&D logo on it. If WotC really wants to capitalize on this new edition, some optional steampunk material might be a good way to start. I realize that many purists don't like it, but I'm no purist, and it seems that I'm not alone, judging by the vast amount of material I can get from third-party sources. Steampunk material, even good steampunk material isn't a panacea of course, but it IS something that no official edition of D&D has ever tapped and might be worth a try.

thorgrim29
2007-12-19, 10:11 PM
Why? Money of course, as it's been said a bazillion times. But that does'nt mean it'll be bad.... WOTC isn't Games Workshop. From what I've seen they gave their best designers the mission of redisigning D&D, and they are doing a stellar job of it. That being said, I wont know for sure until the Core 3 come out.

The_Hunting_Enemy
2007-12-19, 10:22 PM
I believe the reason they are completely re-doing the system is to try something different and see how well it does. If it gets good reviews, brings in good money etc, they'll continue to use it.

I don't get what everyone is complaining about anyways. WHen it comes out, take a look at it. If you don't like it you can just stick with 3.x, and find other people who have done the same.

horseboy
2007-12-19, 10:24 PM
Why? Money of course, as it's been said a bazillion times. But that does'nt mean it'll be bad.... WOTC isn't Games Workshop. From what I've seen they gave their best designers the mission of redisigning D&D, and they are doing a stellar job of it. That being said, I wont know for sure until the Core 3 come out.

No, GW at least knows what they're doing.

Fax Celestis
2007-12-19, 10:24 PM
You know it's interesting; one of the factors that's made me like 3.5 so much is the OGL. I make EXTENSIVE use of Green Ronin, Privateer Press, Paizo, and Malhavoc Press material in my homebrew setting. Really extensive. "Take all the third party stuff out and the setting's not itself anymore" extensive.

Green Ronin is backing out of the D&D compatible market with the assistance of NOS and Malhavoc has shut down. Privateer Press is still publishing, but who knows if WotC will even let them license the Iron Kingdoms to be compatible with 4E? I'm nowhere NEAR done telling stories in that setting. Even if I wind up liking 4E (and I may very well; I don't intend to make any sort of judgment until I get my hands on the three cores & read 'em), that's a sticky problem. Because once you've done fantasy with all the extras (steampunk, psionics, alternate magic systems, etc.) the plain version just doesn't cut it any more. WotC seems pretty adverse to the idea of releasing steampunk material which I just plain don't get. We've got the Iron Kingdoms, Spirosblaak, Warcraft, Sorcery & Steam, OGL Steampunk, DragonMech, Ptolus, and a number of PDF-Only steampunk products. Spirosblaak, DragonMech, and the Iron Kingdoms all have multiple supplements on top of the core book. There JUST A LITTLE BIT of demand for steampunk as evidenced by all of this. Does WotC publish a steampunk setting, supplement, or ANYthing? No. The closest they've gotten was an article on guns during the Paizo era of Dragon, which means that it wasn't them in the first place, even if it had the D&D logo on it. If WotC really wants to capitalize on this new edition, some optional steampunk material might be a good way to start. I realize that many purists don't like it, but I'm no purist, and it seems that I'm not alone, judging by the vast amount of material I can get from third-party sources. Steampunk material, even good steampunk material isn't a panacea of course, but it IS something that no official edition of D&D has ever tapped and might be worth a try.

You do know that 4e will be covered by OGL and therefore be able to continue forward with third-party material like you explained?

The_Hunting_Enemy
2007-12-19, 10:27 PM
I think we should hold out on opinions of 4E until it comes out. No point telling an unborn baby he's ugly.

horseboy
2007-12-19, 10:32 PM
I think we should hold out on opinions of 4E until it comes out. No point telling an unborn baby he's ugly.

Pfft, They all look like Yoda anyway.

Fax Celestis
2007-12-19, 10:38 PM
Pfft, They all look like Yoda anyway.

I thought they looked like Winston Churchill.

The_Hunting_Enemy
2007-12-19, 10:45 PM
Pfft, They all look like Yoda anyway.

...Touché.

SpiderKoopa
2007-12-19, 10:58 PM
Yeah, I'm sad that 4e is coming out. I just mindbinded my parents into buying me 200$ worth of 3.5 books. I WASTED A SPELL!

This snarky Chick reference inspired by me! When I was over at Caxton's house.:smallamused:

And, I'll give 4E a go, but I'm keeping my expectations low. As for why, well... Because I'm really trying to keep an open mind. I am a reformed 3.x-hating-2e-4eva kind of type and I don't want to backslide as this new edition is coming out.:smallsmile:

Timespike
2007-12-19, 11:00 PM
You do know that 4e will be covered by OGL and therefore be able to continue forward with third-party material like you explained?

But who's going to make it? The move from 3.0 to 3.5 was almost the death knell of the third-party RPG business. It's understandable that many of those same companies (the ones still around, anyway) are going to be wary in the extreme. And at least two of the best ones are out entirely.

Fax Celestis
2007-12-19, 11:03 PM
But who's going to make it? The move from 3.0 to 3.5 was almost the death knell of the third-party RPG business. It's understandable that many of those same companies (the ones still around, anyway) are going to be wary in the extreme. And at least two of the best ones are out entirely.

The company may be gone, but the designers and the people behind the companies are still here, and they've learned from the previous edition swaps.

MagicPrime
2007-12-20, 08:22 AM
What it boils down to is simple. As much as everyone hates to admit it, WotC is a company, who's purpose on this earth is to make money. Look at the condition 3.5 is in. Is it good for us gamers? Sure it is, after the fiasco of switching from 2nd AD&D to 3.0 the grognards that held out for so long finally had switched over (for the most part) and things were going smoothly. For the first 2 or so years the splat books that were coming out were great. The Complete Series was awesome. But what now? WotC has ran out of splat material for print. PHBII although a decent book was full of useless crap. Did we really need a chapter on re-designing characters that was 99% fluff with a tid bit of mechanic and two decent sites to possibly add to a campaign? Not really. Luckily the parts of the book that were good, were very good. So I made the purchase. But I realized that WotC was scraping the bottom of the proverbial barrell. (From what I hear the new Dungeon Survival Guide was a piece of crap.) So what is the DnD Division of WotC supposed to do when they run out of stuff to write?

"Well, we have a complete system out there - all the players for the most part like it. Pack it in boys - you're all fired. For all eternity we are just going to re-print the 3.5 edition books and try to make profit of royalties. Dungeon and Dragons toilet paper should be big!"

Of course, I am exaggerating but you get the idea.

So what do they do instead? The release a new edition. New rules, new mechanics, new flavor, new fluff. Why? Because if they don't, despite what the nay sayers say on here think, DnD will die.

Snadgeros
2007-12-20, 08:57 AM
Things I hope to see fixed in 4th Edition, A.K.A. Why 3.X needs to be redone:

-Clerics/Druids/Wizards/Sorcerors, fix them
-Vancian magic-doesn't balance unless you have 4 encounters per day, every day. Replace it with per/encounter abilities.
-Fix two-weapon fighting. It's not a viable option for fighters right now and it SHOULD be.
-The skill system needs streamlining. Spot, listen, and search? A lot of these could be combined. Also, why don't fighters have SPOT as a class skill? Aren't they supposed to be guards?
-Prestige classes and splatbooks. We have way too freaking many of them. Take the good ones, make them base classes, and get rid of the books.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head. I'm sure there's more, but the point is that 3.X is not perfect and therefore, could be improved. Rather than making the world's largest errata to fix it, WotC is just starting fresh, and I like what I see thus far. The online tabletop idea sounds great!

Timespike
2007-12-20, 09:42 AM
The company may be gone, but the designers and the people behind the companies are still here, and they've learned from the previous edition swaps.

Mont Cook has basically thrown up his hands in disgust and gotten out of the business. I seriously doubt Benjamin Durbin's going to do anything like the heroes of high favor series again. Mike Mearls is part of WotC's design team, which in some ways is great, but will probably preclude him producing material like he used to if for no other reason than time constraints. I also have a feeling that with the recalled licenses, etc. that the new SRD will be exceedingly limited.

On the other proverbial hand, I'm sure there are armies of talented designers out there ready to pounce on 4E, and Tome of Battle was one of my favorite third-edition books. But I am going to miss the particular contribution that Monte Cook in particular makes to the industry. If 4E means a new explosion of quality third-party material, I'll be happy about that. If however, a lot of the third-party companies I buy from continue to make 3.5 product well into 2009, I'll likely keep buying it. 4E may be a good system, heck, it may be an absolutely phenomenal system, but 3.5 is pretty darn good, too.

Keep in mind also, I'm not a naysayer, I'm just wary. If I read the 4E core 3 and they're great, I'll switch without hesitation and without remorse as soon as I have ample material to convert my homebrew setting. (And if it's good enough, I might just make a new setting to run games in in the meantime). But WotC would have had to have subcontracted the design of the new system out to Steve Jackson Games if they wanted me to be foaming for the new edition before I really knew anything.

Matthew
2007-12-20, 10:09 AM
What it boils down to is simple. As much as everyone hates to admit it, WotC is a company, who's purpose on this earth is to make money. Look at the condition 3.5 is in. Is it good for us gamers? Sure it is, after the fiasco of switching from 2nd AD&D to 3.0 the grognards that held out for so long finally had switched over (for the most part) and things were going smoothly. For the first 2 or so years the splat books that were coming out were great. The Complete Series was awesome. But what now? WotC has ran out of splat material for print. PHBII although a decent book was full of useless crap. Did we really need a chapter on re-designing characters that was 99% fluff with a tid bit of mechanic and two decent sites to possibly add to a campaign? Not really. Luckily the parts of the book that were good, were very good. So I made the purchase. But I realized that WotC was scraping the bottom of the proverbial barrell. (From what I hear the new Dungeon Survival Guide was a piece of crap.) So what is the DnD Division of WotC supposed to do when they run out of stuff to write?

"Well, we have a complete system out there - all the players for the most part like it. Pack it in boys - you're all fired. For all eternity we are just going to re-print the 3.5 edition books and try to make profit of royalties. Dungeon and Dragons toilet paper should be big!"

Of course, I am exaggerating but you get the idea.

So what do they do instead? The release a new edition. New rules, new mechanics, new flavor, new fluff. Why? Because if they don't, despite what the nay sayers say on here think, DnD will die.

Actually, Wizards' D&D division would die, D&D would just keep trundling along at a much reduced level of market priority.

Honestly, though, these are some odd comments. There are still plenty of grognards refusing to switch editions from 1e/2e/etc (the update from 3.0 to 3.5 did nothing to convince them, as far as I am aware, most were sucked in with 3.0 and what many consider to have been false promises and misleading marketing, whether justly or unjustly) and even people leaving for lighter systems like True20 or Castles & Crusades. I don't think anybody hates to admit that Wizards are a company and need to make money, or that 4e is probably the best way for them to make money at this stage in the life cycle of the brand. In fact, I'm pretty sure that's what 99% of people are saying in this thread.

Fhaolan
2007-12-20, 10:56 AM
Don't ever forget that the accountant's definition of profit (Which is more or less the one you mention) forgets the biggest profit of all, which is succeeding on a task you have place upon yourself. Many smash hits have been done because the person who thinked up the idea carried it through good and bad (Perfect example, though it's not D&D: Apocalypse Now), and refused to give up until it was published.

*blink* You don't honestly believe that do you?

Apocalypse Now was an artistic success. Which means the creators sacrificed their entire lives, their health, their families to the altar of art. Bankrupcies, nervous breakdowns, divorces... If you're suggesting that the publishers of RPGs should follow the Apocalypse Now business model... Dear lord. Coppala tried to commit suicide several times during the production. I don't think anyone really needs to *die* to publish an RPG.

mneme
2007-12-20, 11:18 AM
Bit of an echo chamber, here, but...

I'm really looking forward to 4th edition. 3rd is fun -- but also a pain in the butt; not only the 5 minute day and the class imbalance and mechanics that Just Don't Work (most races/classes being underpowered, multiclassing being both cheese (max out saves!) and bad (lose BAB and other saves for random reasons, pick up very weak off-class abilities in exchange for advancing much stronger core abilities)), many classes being very boring (most fighter types), the need to load up on items to have a competitive character, and fights being ridiculously short (how many mid-high level fights go beyond 2-3 rounds?).

4e, with its unified progression, level-based power system, per-encounter/at will nature of most abilities, "multiclassing" through talent selection rather than PRCs, and abolishment of the research nightmare that is optimizing wizards/clerics/druid spell lists, promises to fix pretty much every gripe I ever had about 3E.

4E doesn't create less customizable characters than 3E (aside from wizards with insane spell lists and clerics and druids who pray for different spells every frigging day); it creates -more- customizable characters -- because you're picking at least one different thing every level, rather than having to write a whole frigging PRC or "alternate level" in order to have an acrobatic thief or a dragon-hearted mage. In 4E, rather than having those options be whole classes or static levels, they're just talent options within the larger system.

And...gnomes, bards, and sorcerers aren't gone from 3E -- gnomes will be a playable PC class listed in MM! And bards and sorcerers will appear in suplements -- they're just not going to be in the big 3! (similarly, my impression is that they're leaving summoning mechanics out of the core three books but plan to reintroduce them later, with more attention spent on detail, probably avoiding the "here are the 10 monsters that every cleric of this level can summon, of which you will ever summon...two." issue.

The Kool
2007-12-20, 11:35 AM
Looks like this has been picked over pretty thoroughly, but I'll toss in my two cents.

The first one *clink*, WotC has, like has been said, written pretty much every conceivable add-on for 3.x, and there's nothing left to write. 4ed looks back over that, compiles all the added rules and stuff, fixes what they think needs fixing, and tosses it in the database of the 21st century: the internet. The way I see it, you buy the three core books, and you can play, and instead of getting a library of additional information, if you want any extras, it's on the 'net.

The second one *clink*, I, personally, will stick with 3.x, because, A, that's what I have, and I don't want to buy a whole 'nother set, B, I don't want to learn a whole 'nother set of rules, and C, I think it's what most people will stick with anyway. Saga ed SW was one thing, but this is another. Even 2ed has it's merits, and I play it from time to time.

In short, I think the main reason for 4ed is the internet.

horseboy
2007-12-20, 02:31 PM
*blink* You don't honestly believe that do you?

Apocalypse Now was an artistic success. Which means the creators sacrificed their entire lives, their health, their families to the altar of art. Bankrupcies, nervous breakdowns, divorces... If you're suggesting that the publishers of RPGs should follow the Apocalypse Now business model... Dear lord. Coppala tried to commit suicide several times during the production. I don't think anyone really needs to *die* to publish an RPG.

And it wasn't even that good. FMJ curb stomps it every time.

Mr. Friendly
2007-12-20, 02:42 PM
I liked Apocalypse Now and Redux. However for "best 'Nam movie" I also really like Platoon and Boys in Company C.

Trying to get the subject back on topic of "why 4e?"

The simple answer is WotC hates all of you and they just want to make everything WoW+anime. Fortunately, many people are on to their evil schemes and have realised that they never should have switched from 1e. That 1e was a perfect game, in and of itself and should never have changed at all or added new content. That only maintaining a system of racism and gender bias with a mere handful of choices, choices which are dictated by a DM who rules your play experience like a God-King, can you truly have fun and be free to express your creativity. :smalleek: [/rampage]

Or not.

Wake up and smell the coffee. 3e needs a big enough fix that a new edition is needed. If you don't think so, don't buy 4e and keep playing 3e if you think it is just fine.

Renegade Paladin
2007-12-20, 03:46 PM
In principle, a new edition is not a bad thing. Heck, I'd welcome it. The problem is that all the (sparse) changes announced so far suck. Why get rid of gnomes? Why essentially mandate the Points of Light concept? Why completely wreck their existing campaign settings to adhere to said concept? Why alter or eliminate whole classes of outsiders? Why completely change the entire concept of the planes?

Essentially, what they've done so far is make it impossible to have any continuity with existing campaigns. Sure, 2e to 3e was a huge rules change mechanically, but the flavor and most of the monsters, races, classes, etc were still there; you could convert characters over to the new ruleset and continue on your merry way. WotC seems hellbent on making this impossible in the change from 3e to 4e. What am I supposed to say to the players? "Oops, that horned devil you fought last year that killed the rogue was actually a demon, so the demonbane sword you used should have taken it out before it had the chance to kill a character; here have him back?" :smallyuk:

Changing the mechanics is understandable and even I daresay necessary. What they're actually doing, however, is drastically altering things that don't need it for absolutely no reason whatsoever. And that's Not Good™.

JadedDM
2007-12-20, 04:31 PM
So what do they do instead? The release a new edition. New rules, new mechanics, new flavor, new fluff. Why? Because if they don't, despite what the nay sayers say on here think, DnD will die.

Actually, Wizards' D&D division would die, D&D would just keep trundling along at a much reduced level of market priority.

Exactly. D&D wouldn't die. If that were the case, then Monopoly should have died ages ago, because they haven't been regularly updating the rules. WotC would still make money on D&D, they just wouldn't make AS MUCH as they can if they have everyone upgrade and declare all the books they currently have as worthless.

And people eat it up. It's kind of genius, really, in a sort of dark way.

Several people have stated that 3E has some serious problems that require addressing--hence 4E. But from what I understand, 4E is not only addressing those problems. It's also doing a whole bunch of other stuff, too. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but I was never aware that among 3E's problems were gnomes and half-orcs. (I know some people don't like them, but...they weren't game breaking or anything).

Naturally, 4E will have its own flaws that will require addressing. And to be honest, it would not surprise me at all if those flaws were placed there on purpose. After all, that gives them something to fix for 4.5E or 5E.

Fhaolan
2007-12-20, 05:56 PM
Exactly. D&D wouldn't die. If that were the case, then Monopoly should have died ages ago, because they haven't been regularly updating the rules. WotC would still make money on D&D, they just wouldn't make AS MUCH as they can if they have everyone upgrade and declare all the books they currently have as worthless.

Actually, they do update Monopoly on a regular basis. That's why there are so many different Monopoly sets out there. Branded Monopolies are the big money-maker that allows them to continue publishing Classic Monopoly. Just like all those special Risks and whatnot. :smallsmile:

Reel On, Love
2007-12-20, 06:17 PM
In principle, a new edition is not a bad thing. Heck, I'd welcome it. The problem is that all the (sparse) changes announced so far suck. Why get rid of gnomes?
Because gnomes suck and must die.
That aside, gnomes are not iconic in any way, not popular, and not consistent. Mechanical tinkerers, illusionists, bards that talk to badgers... the gnomes have never had a consistent flavor or archetype, when all the other races do.
Plus the last time I saw someone play a gnome was months ago. If you don't count Whisper Gnomes (which you shouldn't, they don't have the problem regular gnomes do), over a year. If you don't count "for comedic value", a bad reason for a race, I don't even remember. Tieflings and Grey Elves from the MM certainly get a lot more play than gnomes in my experience.


Why essentially mandate the Points of Light concept? Why completely wreck their existing campaign settings to adhere to said concept?
Because that's their new default, rather than the "generic but not" blandly flavored Greyhawk.
They're not wrecking all of their campaign settings; Eberron, AFAIK, is fine. They're "wrecking" the Forgotten Realms because that happens every so often. Hey, remember the whole Time of Troubles thing? This is like that.


Why alter or eliminate whole classes of outsiders? Why completely change the entire concept of the planes?
To make them make more sense? There was virtually no difference between demons and devils save that the former were nominally more orderly and lawful.


Essentially, what they've done so far is make it impossible to have any continuity with existing campaigns. Sure, 2e to 3e was a huge rules change mechanically, but the flavor and most of the monsters, races, classes, etc were still there; you could convert characters over to the new ruleset and continue on your merry way. WotC seems hellbent on making this impossible in the change from 3e to 4e. What am I supposed to say to the players? "Oops, that horned devil you fought last year that killed the rogue was actually a demon, so the demonbane sword you used should have taken it out before it had the chance to kill a character; here have him back?" :smallyuk:
They're focusing on making the new edition good, not on compatibility. You know what you're supposed to say to the players? "Let's finish this campaign. Next one we start up, we can use 4E." I can't imagine converting a whole campaign from 2E to 3E anyway, and I don't know anyone who did so.


Changing the mechanics is understandable and even I daresay necessary. What they're actually doing, however, is drastically altering things that don't need it for absolutely no reason whatsoever. And that's Not Good™.
That's not what they're doing. They ARE killing a lot of sacred cows that weren't actually good for the game.
What they're doing is designing the new edition... well, not quite from scratch, but only with an eye on the old one, rather than on its foundation.

Reel On, Love
2007-12-20, 06:23 PM
Exactly. D&D wouldn't die. If that were the case, then Monopoly should have died ages ago, because they haven't been regularly updating the rules. WotC would still make money on D&D, they just wouldn't make AS MUCH as they can if they have everyone upgrade and declare all the books they currently have as worthless.

And people eat it up. It's kind of genius, really, in a sort of dark way.
Monopoly IS freaking dead. When was the last time you and your friends got together for an exciting game of monopoly? It's an old, dull game that's hardly thriving.

WotC is not going to come to your house and burn your books. You can play as much 3.5 as you like. So you don't get an opportunity to spend money on *more* WotC splatbooks... there's third-party ones out there.


Several people have stated that 3E has some serious problems that require addressing--hence 4E. But from what I understand, 4E is not only addressing those problems. It's also doing a whole bunch of other stuff, too. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but I was never aware that among 3E's problems were gnomes and half-orcs. (I know some people don't like them, but...they weren't game breaking or anything).
No, 4E is not only addressing 3E's serious problems. It's redoing the game, with good game design. Gnomes are moving to the monster manual because they didn't have a consistent design (tinkerers, cunning illusionists, carefree bards, etc) like the other races, among other reasons. And I've seen things from the MM (like grey elves *cough Eladrin cough* and tieflings) get a lot more play than gnomes.


Naturally, 4E will have its own flaws that will require addressing. And to be honest, it would not surprise me at all if those flaws were placed there on purpose. After all, that gives them something to fix for 4.5E or 5E.
Is 4E going to be THE PERFECT GAME? No.
Will it be much better designed? Yes.
Will there be a 5E? Yeah, probably, in seven or eight years. So what? All RPGs (that don't die out) go through edition changes.

JadedDM
2007-12-20, 07:26 PM
Monopoly IS freaking dead. When was the last time you and your friends got together for an exciting game of monopoly? It's an old, dull game that's hardly thriving.

Uh, well, it's primarily a children's game, one I outgrew years ago. That has nothing to do with rule changes. If they revamped the rules to Monopoly, I doubt it would spark any interest in me whatsoever anyway. But anyway, I never said it was THRIVING. I said it still existed. You can still buy them in shops, right? They are still making Monopoly sets, aren't they? That's my point. WotC could still make money on D&D as it is. They just wouldn't make AS MUCH.


WotC is not going to come to your house and burn your books. You can play as much 3.5 as you like. So you don't get an opportunity to spend money on *more* WotC splatbooks... there's third-party ones out there.

I actually have never played 3E, only 2E. And yes, I still play it. And no, nobody burned my books when 3E came out. But to those who plan to stick to an older edition, I can say with experience: Good luck finding players. I usually have to wind up recruiting people who have no D&D experience whatsoever, because WotC has done such a thorough job at bad-mouthing and over-exaggerating 2E's flaws that nobody wants anything to do with it. Just like they're doing with 3E right now. (Grapple is the new THAC0, folks).


Gnomes are moving to the monster manual because they didn't have a consistent design (tinkerers, cunning illusionists, carefree bards, etc) like the other races

That hardly seems a valid reason. You could say the same thing about elves. In one setting, they're a playful fey-like race that dances in the woods. In another, they are a haughty, ancient people who look their noses down on the other, 'lesser' races. In another setting, elves worship their ancestors and uh...okay, well admittedly that's all I know about elves in Eberron. But the point is, you could say that any race is like that.

And is making each race completely inflexible and unchanging despite setting really want the people want?

Matthew
2007-12-20, 07:57 PM
Because that's their new default, rather than the "generic but not" blandly flavored Greyhawk.
They're not wrecking all of their campaign settings; Eberron, AFAIK, is fine. They're "wrecking" the Forgotten Realms because that happens every so often. Hey, remember the whole Time of Troubles thing? This is like that.

Hmmn. The Time of Troubles wasn't that huge a departure, as far as I recall. A bit of an upset, sure, but not to the degree we appear to be talking about with 4e Faerun. To be fair, a lot of 1e players claim that it was a huge watershed and a poor show.
Honestly, I don't really care what they do with the Forgotten Realms, but it does seem as though this is a much bigger change than the Time of Troubles (the main criticism of the stuff that comes afterwards tends to be the degree of detail, which is a fairly typical 1e complaint and part of a different approach to campaign worlds).


I actually have never played 3E, only 2E. And yes, I still play it. And no, nobody burned my books when 3E came out. But to those who plan to stick to an older edition, I can say with experience: Good luck finding players. I usually have to wind up recruiting people who have no D&D experience whatsoever, because WotC has done such a thorough job at bad-mouthing and over-exaggerating 2E's flaws that nobody wants anything to do with it. Just like they're doing with 3E right now. (Grapple is the new THAC0, folks).

I don't have this problem; I don't know why.


That hardly seems a valid reason. You could say the same thing about elves. In one setting, they're a playful fey-like race that dances in the woods. In another, they are a haughty, ancient people who look their noses down on the other, 'lesser' races. In another setting, elves worship their ancestors and uh...okay, well admittedly that's all I know about elves in Eberron. But the point is, you could say that any race is like that.

I would tend to agree with this.


And is making each race completely inflexible and unchanging despite setting really want the people want?

Actually, yes. One thing Wizards are very interested in is expanding their fan base and I would never accuse them of having poor business sense. It's a lot easier to sell a solid concept than a vague or dislocated one. There's no denying that D20 was "what many people wanted," I have few doubts that 4e will play to a similarly large fan base who really do want the things that it provides.

That's what proponents of previous editions really have to come to terms with, 'good' is subjective and what they (or rather we) may like or dislike doesn't translate to what is universally (or even commonly) desired. The things I like are not popular, not even within the 'geek' subset of society and it doesn't surprise me.

Lex-Kat
2007-12-20, 08:53 PM
Well, after buying 7 of the complete books; the 3 core books (for both 3.0 & 3.5); the 5 3.0 base class books (i.e. Sword & Fist); the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting; Faiths & Pantheons; 3 of the Races books; 3 climate specific books; & others I can't think of right now, I've spent well over $800 on these books. That's quite a profit coming from 1 person.:smallannoyed:

But feel free to support them. You may be right; it may be a better system than 3.0/5. I'll wait until they tell everyone that 4.0/5 is horrible and that 5.0 will not only be much better, but will keep D & D alive.

Crow
2007-12-20, 09:00 PM
"Look everybody, 3.5 was terrible. It has so many flaws that it is nigh unplayable. But we've learned our lesson, and this time it's going to be different. Oh yeah, feel free to buy advertising material from us. We don't need to give it out for free because some of you out there will buy anything we bind together at the printing press.

Oh yeah, and we're going to make a little cartoon to explain some new things to you. Because obviously you would prefer it that way, not that you would be mature enough to appreciate a well-written article on the subject anyways."

Matthew
2007-12-20, 09:13 PM
"Look everybody, 3.5 was terrible. It has so many flaws that it is nigh unplayable. But we've learned our lesson, and this time it's going to be different. Oh yeah, feel free to buy advertising material from us. We don't need to give it out for free because some of you out there will buy anything we bind together at the printing press.

Oh yeah, and we're going to make a little cartoon to explain some new things to you. Because obviously you would prefer it that way, not that you would be mature enough to appreciate a well-written article on the subject anyways."

Welcome to "you-are-no-longer-Wizards'-target-audience-ville" - Population: You, me and a bunch of other folk, mainly over twenty.

horseboy
2007-12-20, 09:18 PM
Welcome to "you-are-no-longer-Wizards'-target-audience-ville" - Population: You, me and a bunch of other folk, mainly over twenty.

I'd give it 24, out of college, supposed to be a "serious" person now. :smallamused: Got a wife and family coming no time for fun. :smallwink: :smallwink: *nudge* *nudge*

JadedDM
2007-12-20, 09:34 PM
I always thought one of the more interesting factors about gnomes was that they weren't forced into a stereotype as much as the others. You can do whatever you want with them and it won't necessarily defy anyone's expectations.

I mean, I just had a rather annoying argument with my players about halflings, particularly one player who felt that all halflings had to conform to one of three archetypes: Frodo, Sam, and Merry/Pippin. I've also had arguments with players over time about whether all dwarves must be grumpy alcoholics and all elves have to be haughty jerks.

I just can't believe gnomes are disliked because they aren't stereotyped enough.

Matthew
2007-12-20, 10:04 PM
I'd give it 24, out of college, supposed to be a "serious" person now. :smallamused: Got a wife and family coming no time for fun. :smallwink: :smallwink: *nudge* *nudge*

Heh, I might have said so before I read this post: Old School: Hope Springs Eternal (http://www.knights-n-knaves.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=3960)

bugsysservant
2007-12-20, 10:24 PM
Personally, I hate the fact that gnomes are relegated to the Monster Manual, especially when the designers have expressed remarkable resistance towards playble monster races. Gnomes are as ill defined as elves, perhaps even less. Races shouldn't be so restricted in flavor. Seems like for every niche there is a different race, shoehorning entire species into idiot stereotypes so WoTC can pump out more material. Want a free spirited mountain people, reclusive and strong? Great we have dwarves. Wait, they aren't dwarves? A sub-species? A whole different RACE? What the hell is a Goliath anyway? (Note: personally I like goliaths, but I do think that their existance is rather idiotic) We can't make a free spirited dwarf because all dwarves are lawful ale soaked smiths, merrily tunneling away underground.

Artanis
2007-12-21, 03:17 AM
Personally, I hate the fact that gnomes are relegated to the Monster Manual, especially when the designers have expressed remarkable resistance towards playble monster races.
That's not exactly true. They've expressed resistance to taking a random monster and making a PC out of it, so they're instead making seperate entries for anything that would actually work as a PC. So Gnomes will still be perfectly playable despite being in the MM, and will be infinitely more playable than the vast majority of the 3.5 monsters that could (in theory) be made into PCs.

Khanderas
2007-12-21, 03:38 AM
I'm going to second what some people already said.
* WOTC is a buissness, they want, Nay, NEED to make money.
* 3.x has powercreeped and is now too big for itself. A mention of 500 ish classes... (PrC included). Every new class needs to be better then the old in some way, not all of them can be balanced, especially not when combined.
* New edition means new books and perhaps new players ? Especially with (assuming) easier rules and the fact everyone will be a newbie (kinda) when it hits the stores.

Lord_Kimboat
2007-12-21, 07:10 AM
Well I see that I win either way.

Case 1 - 4E does all the things that WOTC promises, makes the game better, more fun and easier for me. I buy the books, WOTC makes a profit, everyone is happy.

Case 2 - 4E sucks like a Hoover 3000 on steroids. I find out from the schmuc . . . beta testers and the good people who write to forums like this. I keep my old 3.5 books, point out to my gaming friends just how craptacular 4E is and we go back to 3.5. WOTC doesn't make money until someone bright or brave enough pronounces 4E dead and they go on to something else. If/when that something else is good enough for me to spend my hard earned, I then go to it.

Granted, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle here but realise people. We are the customers here! They are creating this stuff to please us . . . well, actually to make money, but they won't do that unless we are pleased with their product.

Now, I feel for people who liked Half-Orcs and Gnomes. I have a Gnome character now that I'm having a great time playing. I have no intentions of giving him up any time soon. Just because they release 4E doesn't mean I have to run out and buy it the instant it hits the shelves! It's not a race. If I don't play it until it's been out for a year . . . that's okay. I'm pretty sure I'll pull through.

Titanium Dragon
2007-12-21, 07:52 AM
Fourth edition "needs" to exist in some capacity; third edition really is fundamentally broken. However, a lot of people suspect (probably correctly) that 4th edition isn't going to make the sweeping changes neccessary to fix the problems in third edition.

I do think that WotC needs to release splatbooks more slowly though - their current rate of release is, I think, non-sustainable. People will get fed up with 4.5 or 5th edition in 2013 - a system needs to last 8-10 years, not 4. Why? Because otherwise people will get fed up and switch over to GURPS or another system, or simply decline to purchase yet another new edition. I suspect that you can only swindle people once per decade.


Naturally, 4E will have its own flaws that will require addressing. And to be honest, it would not surprise me at all if those flaws were placed there on purpose. After all, that gives them something to fix for 4.5E or 5E.

Producing a deliberately flawed product is a terrible idea. Why? Because we won't buy it, and then there won't be a 4.5e because you went bankrupt. If 4e sucks, then no one should buy it, you should not care that WotC will go belly up, and you should purchase other high-quality products with your money instead.

See, capitalism isn't just "the companies produce their product and screw the consumer"; the consumer needs to want the product. If the product is poor, then by refusing to purchase the product, the company goes bankrupt and the consumer wins because there are lots of other companies out there producing products they want you to buy, and some of them will be high quality enough to be worth buying. Maximizing your dollar:happiness ratio is a good thing, after all, and companies which help you do that will get much more of your money.

3.5 is a pretty bad system, and it isn't WotC that is saying it; it is the player base. 3.5 sucks. It doesn't work well, and arguably works worse than 2nd edition did in many ways from a mechanical standpoint when all is said and done. But people are erecting a false dichotomy here: stick with 3.5 or switch to 4th. Really, we're under no obligation to stick with D&D at all, and you should all remember that going into this - there are other, perhaps better systems out there and you should choose the best of them, not the one with the D&D brand logo on it.

Mr. Friendly
2007-12-21, 07:59 AM
"Look everybody, 3.5 was terrible. It has so many flaws that it is nigh unplayable. But we've learned our lesson, and this time it's going to be different. Oh yeah, feel free to buy advertising material from us. We don't need to give it out for free because some of you out there will buy anything we bind together at the printing press.

Oh yeah, and we're going to make a little cartoon to explain some new things to you. Because obviously you would prefer it that way, not that you would be mature enough to appreciate a well-written article on the subject anyways."

Incidentally Mr. "I hate 4e now and forever no matter what, without ever actually looking at it" Crow, I got my "bought advertising" as you call it, and it is the designers journals. It is playtesting, mechanical insights, why they changed this and that, along with a lot of good artwork. I think it is useful to know what the designers were thinking when they did this or that, why they chose one thing over another and what their intentions were in designing a certain power or feature.

Too bad 3.5 lacked books like these. A lot of arguements of RAW vs. RAI might have been avoided.

Plus, I like looking at cool fantasy artwork. Good thing good old Gary and Co. at TSR never did anything like this, you would have stopped playing AD&D a long time ago!

See also: The Art of Dragonlance, The Art of AD&D etc. Original retail prices ~$30+

Compared to "bought advertising" (AKA half designer journal, half art book) price ~$15

WotC is so EVIL! Gary just wanted us to buy art that was already on the books we already bought and pay 30 bucks for it...

As an aside, accoding to the Inflation Calculator (http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl), $30 in 1985 is equivalent to almost $60 today.

But don't let me stop your perfectly good hyperbolic invective.

Matthew
2007-12-21, 08:17 AM
I don't think Crow is making a case for buying the Art of Dragonlance, Mr Friendly. There's no denying that TSR were a company every bit as interested in money as Wizards. That doesn't make it any more palatable for those who have a problem with some of the peripheral offerings (I, incidently, don't, as I think these items make good business sense).

ALOR
2007-12-21, 08:37 AM
Welcome to "you-are-no-longer-Wizards'-target-audience-ville" - Population: You, me and a bunch of other folk, mainly over twenty.

This is absolutly true. I'm not sure why they would want to alienate there older fans (considering D&D is played by many of all ages) but it really does feel like they are doing so.

Mr. Friendly
2007-12-21, 08:38 AM
This is absolutly true. I'm not sure why they would want to alienate there older fans (considering D&D is played by many of all ages) but it really does feel like they are doing so.

Tell me, oh persecuted ones, what they are doing to alienate you.

Psst. How old are you? I'm 32 and I like what I am see ing for 4e.

Actually, I think I am gonna make a new thread for this...

Edit: Thread made. http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=67298

ALOR
2007-12-21, 08:52 AM
Tell me, oh persecuted ones, what they are doing to alienate you.

Psst. How old are you? I'm 32 and I like what I am see ing for 4e.

Actually, I think I am gonna make a new thread for this...

Mr friendly, I get it, You like 4e. You have made that clear. Everything I have read about 4e I have disliked. If you don't agree, thats fine. You don't need to continue to making sniping remarks at everyone who doesn't like what they have seen so far from 4e. You are not living up to your name Mr Friendly. :smallamused:
To answer your question, I feel Like they are atempting to apeal to the kids who play WoW. And I am 28 by the way.

Surfing HalfOrc
2007-12-21, 08:53 AM
OK, how to say this best...

Is there any way to make D&D as a non-cyclical product? I see a lot of people saying that all the books and other material is all played out, although I don't really buy that. (Pun not intended! :smallbiggrin: )

Look at it this way: Monopoly has been around in many forms for how many DECADES? It's a solid ruleset, not too many exploitable mechanics, sells steadily, makes it's publisher a solid, steady profit. Is there a way to make a balanced, relativly non-rules exploitable version of the game, and leave it "as is" for a while?

And yeah, I know the games companies have done several major make overs for many of the "old saw" games, and to good effect. But that was done to make those games "play faster," while D&D has always been about playing for four hours to several days.

And since I honestly don't know, what's happening to OGL in 4th Ed? Will outside companies be able to make material for the game, or is Hasbro going to pull an "Atari" on us?

Rachel Lorelei
2007-12-21, 08:57 AM
To answer your question, I feel Like they are atempting to apeal to the kids who play WoW. And I am 28 by the way.

Um.

Except insofar as D&D is for geeks and so is WoW, how on earth are you getting that impression?

Khanderas
2007-12-21, 09:02 AM
OK, how to say this best...

Is there any way to make D&D as a non-cyclical product? I see a lot of people saying that all the books and other material is all played out, although I don't really buy that. (Pun not intended! :smallbiggrin: )

Look at it this way: Monopoly has been around in many forms for how many DECADES? It's a solid ruleset, not too many exploitable mechanics, sells steadily, makes it's publisher a solid, steady profit. Is there a way to make a balanced, relativly non-rules exploitable version of the game, and leave it "as is" for a while?
Splatbooks I would say. The anology would fit better if you could buy alternative rules for Monopoly, including extra "go" squares and überhotels.

Me ? Eh. I don't care much either way regarding 4e.


Um.

Except insofar as D&D is for geeks and so is WoW, how on earth are you getting that impression?
I agree with you, except WoW has passed its for geeks phase. Good or bad, but it is mainstream now. (This explains the sheer number of noobs there :D )
Can't really say myself how it would be WoW'ing DnD, I know too little about 4e.

ALOR
2007-12-21, 09:07 AM
Um.

Except insofar as D&D is for geeks and so is WoW, how on earth are you getting that impression?

My group does not Play WoW. In fact we find playing MMORPG's to defeat the purpose of gaming, Social interaction with friends. I'm basing this off only my gaming group, and the gaming groups i know around me. So if I feel that
4e is going toward WoW then yes I feel alienated becasue I do not play nor like WoW.

Mr. Friendly
2007-12-21, 09:10 AM
My group does not Play WoW. In fact we find playing MMORPG's to defeat the purpose of gaming, Social interaction with friends. I'm basing this off only my gaming group, and the gaming groups i know around me. So if I feel that
4e is going toward WoW then yes I feel alienated becasue I do not play nor like WoW.

What exactly makes 4e = WoW ?

ALOR
2007-12-21, 09:13 AM
And since I honestly don't know, what's happening to OGL in 4th Ed? Will outside companies be able to make material for the game, or is Hasbro going to pull an "Atari" on us?

I asked this question in another thread not to long ago. From what I was told 4e will be OGL.

Rachel Lorelei
2007-12-21, 09:13 AM
My group does not Play WoW. In fact we find playing MMORPG's to defeat the purpose of gaming, Social interaction with friends. I'm basing this off only my gaming group, and the gaming groups i know around me. So if I feel that
4e is going toward WoW then yes I feel alienated becasue I do not play nor like WoW.

No, I mean, what makes you think that 4E is "going toward WoW"? Given the vastly different purposes they serve, ways in which they play, and the ways in which they entertain you, that just strikes me as a really... odd... impression to have. I'm not sure exactly how you would make D&D "like WoW", barring using WoW races and classes and stuff, since WoW is designed for very different things than D&D (something which, I expect, the designers of 4E know).

(Besides, even if 4E was becoming like WoW... wouldn't it still serve the purpose of social interaction with friends, since you play it around a table?)

Matthew
2007-12-21, 09:15 AM
What exactly makes 4e = WoW ?

That's the second part of the general question.

D&D is becoming too much like Anime
D&D is becoming too much like a Video Game

In both cases, D&D was already like these things, it's only a matter of degree; the observer is identifying the things he considers to be negative aspects of the above two and seeing them in D&D.

Khanderas
2007-12-21, 09:18 AM
My group does not Play WoW. In fact we find playing MMORPG's to defeat the purpose of gaming, Social interaction with friends. I'm basing this off only my gaming group, and the gaming groups i know around me. So if I feel that
4e is going toward WoW then yes I feel alienated becasue I do not play nor like WoW.
Youuu willl jooooinnn uuuusss :smallwink:

ALOR
2007-12-21, 09:20 AM
What exactly makes 4e = WoW ?

I didn't say 4e = WoW, I said it's moving toward WoW. And this is just a feeling I have from the things I've read about 4e, just a general feeling.

Rachel Lorelei
2007-12-21, 09:23 AM
I didn't say 4e = WoW, I said it's moving toward WoW. And this is just a feeling I have from the things I've read about 4e, just a general feeling.

So, nothing specifically gives you that feeling, you're just getting it? Don't you think it's more likely that you're just worrying about it, rather than that your feeling is right and D&D is somehow becoming more like a game of a totally different type meant to do totally different things?

Mr. Friendly
2007-12-21, 09:25 AM
I didn't say 4e = WoW, I said it's moving toward WoW. And this is just a feeling I have from the things I've read about 4e, just a general feeling.

What gives you that feeling, if I may ask?

To be honest with you, I am an ex-WoW player (5 months clean and sober!) and an ex-Evercrack player (a few years clean) and I played both because I was looking to get D&D all the time, even when we weren't gaming. I quit both because they didn't have enough D&D to them. There are elements in them though that are good concepts to add to tabletop D&D.

Edit: I should add an example of what I mean by the last statement.

The Everquest "con" system; WoW has something similar. Prior to 3e and really prior to 3.5 when it was better defined, there was really no mechanical way to learn what a monster was and whether or not fighting it would be suicide. Seriously. You are an adventurer, your party just cleared out a nest of 12 foot long, six-legged lizards that could turn you to stone. While exploring deeper you find a single floating ball with a big eye and some eyestalks? That's an easy fight, right? Yes, there is RP, yes the DM shouldn't be sending you against save or dies fights when yo ucan't handle it, but that is life. Many a DM runs the game as a free-form world with static locations that, while they change over time, always exist... it's not the DMs fault if you didn't talk to the innkeeper about the Beholder....right? I just think it is kinda needed to prevent TPK and I would say that EQ (more than WoW) inspired that particular change.

DrewDaGreek
2007-12-21, 09:26 AM
Ok, one reason is obvious to me that noone has mentioned.

It does in some way have to do with money.. two words:

Online play

If anyone has tried play by post, you know the pitfalls.
1) What's this DM's style.. can I unload, or must I save up for later? - No worries with encounter powers.
2) I like to play this role, will the DM allow me this character? - No worries with dragontype, teifling, eladrin (magic focused elves) and such included in the PHB
3) We're missing a cleric! - No worries, every class gets some healing abilities
4) We need 'specific cure spell' - No worries, clerics can ritual it, no need for pre-guessing the DM or for Dm seeding of the treasure horde.
5) Our mage either good in combat or out of it - No worries, rituals to the rescue -Diviners can hold their own
6) The dragon breathes fire - wait for each player's saving throwings - No worries, the DM can roll one die vs the whole party.
7) This character is just support - No worries, every class can be fun in combat, not just curing or trapfinding.
8) What homebrew is the DM using - No worries, the PHB comes with a flexible enough setting to allow people to run games.
9) What about my skills, spells per day, round durations, and all that junk - No worries, encounter duration spells, encounter refreshed powers, easier skill system.

All of these make it easier to play online, much easier.

Imagine trying to make a character, jump in a virtual tavern, assemble a party and crawl into a dungeon with 3.5 Very difficult.

I think 4e is much more streamlined for this. The online game is what I suspect wizards of trying to sell.

Rachel Lorelei
2007-12-21, 09:33 AM
Ok, one reason is obvious to me that noone has mentioned.

It does in some way have to do with money.. two words:

Online play

If anyone has tried play by post, you know the pitfalls.
1) What's this DM's style.. can I unload, or must I save up for later? - No worries with encounter powers.
This, um, applies to tabletop just as much as online play.


2) I like to play this role, will the DM allow me this character? - No worries with dragontype, teifling, eladrin (magic focused elves) and such included in the PHB
...as opposed to the 3.5 races?


3) We're missing a cleric! - No worries, every class gets some healing abilities
This is just good game design... but 3.5 already had lots of ways to get healing without a cleric.


4) We need 'specific cure spell' - No worries, clerics can ritual it, no need for pre-guessing the DM or for Dm seeding of the treasure horde.
5) Our mage either good in combat or out of it - No worries, rituals to the rescue -Diviners can hold their own
Clerics could already just prepare the right spell the next day (since they had access to their whole list). Diviners were already just fine out of combat. I'm not sure how ritual spells make online play better/easier/anything.


6) The dragon breathes fire - wait for each player's saving throwings - No worries, the DM can roll one die vs the whole party.
7) This character is just support - No worries, every class can be fun in combat, not just curing or trapfinding.
This is just a refining of something that was already the intention.


8) What homebrew is the DM using - No worries, the PHB comes with a flexible enough setting to allow people to run games.
9) What about my skills, spells per day, round durations, and all that junk - No worries, encounter duration spells, encounter refreshed powers, easier skill system.
All of these make it easier to play online, much easier.
What? No, they don't. How? There was already a bland default setting (everybody just homebrews worlds anyway). The shift to per-encounter doesn't make online play any more easy than it does tabletop play; it's an overall design decision, not online-related.

Imagine trying to make a character, jump in a virtual tavern, assemble a party and crawl into a dungeon with 3.5 Very difficult.

I think 4e is much more streamlined for this. The online game is what I suspect wizards of trying to sell.
Except... it wasn't very difficult with 3.5. There are dozens (hundreds?) of PbP games running on this site alone.

While you're right, Wizards *is* marketing online play--that's what D&D Insider is for; they're offering an OpenRPG-type "virtual board" to make online group play more fun and easier, with maps and virtual minis and such. It has nothing to do with design.

Basically, I think you're just making things up here.

ALOR
2007-12-21, 09:46 AM
Ok I think we are at this point hijacking the thread with all this WoW vs D&D discussion, My apollogies to Surfing Halforc for getting it started. Perhaps someone should make a thread on this subject if we wish to discuss it further.

Mr.Moron
2007-12-21, 09:50 AM
I didn't say 4e = WoW, I said it's moving toward WoW. And this is just a feeling I have from the things I've read about 4e, just a general feeling.

I'd be curious to learn how much you know about WoW exactly, and how you're using the knowledge to make the conclusions you are.

-How much have you played WoW?

-What aspects of the game did you experience, and in how much depth?

-Which of those aspects are you seeing directly translated into 4e?

-Are those aspects exclusive to WoW? Or are they general concepts that can be found in other areas of gaming?

-Lastly, what about those aspects do you find negative, and why?

DrewDaGreek
2007-12-21, 09:50 AM
I always found PbP to be clunky and not work out. Alot of uncertainity of what to be prepared for.

I found design by random people to be inconsistant, never sure of you needed to load up on combat or cure.

I found assembling a party to be a bit of a pain, trying to balance roles.

Perhaps you've found some easy simple play by post, but I've never gotten one past 3 encounters.

Matthew
2007-12-21, 10:14 AM
I'd be curious to learn how much you know about WoW exactly, and how you're using the knowledge to make the conclusions you are.

-How much have you played WoW?

-What aspects of the game did you experience, and in how much depth?

-Which of those aspects are you seeing directly translated into 4e?

-Are those aspects exclusive to WoW? Or are they general concepts that can be found in other areas of gaming?

-Lastly, what about those aspects do you find negative, and why?

Let's start another WoW versus D&D or D&D is becoming too much like a Video game Thread, then.

hamishspence
2007-12-21, 12:12 PM
World of warcraft: do not know much about it.

I have never played online games: mmm, 5 hours whacking a post to boost a skill a teeny bit. And if you lock key down and disappear for lunch you get booted out for not answering GMs who check to make sure you do not do that.

Ultima Online was culprit, according to those on its main site, Stratics.

Now that game had a lot of style: big world, many monsters, but got ruined by too many player killers.

Online games getting too much influence on D&D? Not sure about that.

My model was Diablo II more than WoW. Steady rise, no period where it is far too easy, except at beginning. lots of times when far to HARD (uniques with right abilities too close to entrance to dungeon)

Now it was fun, but it did not have the "You can go anywhere you like, given time and travel fees" feel that good D&D has in common with MMoRPG's

D&D is weakest at low level: too easy to get killed with a couple of bad rolls. High levels need careful DM work to avoid cheap wins for players, keep fun up, and avoid being bogged down in complexity.

If 4th ed has that Diablo-ish feel of not too hard in beginning, traps do not automatically wreck adventure, battle and fun still possible all the way up, I'm for it.

Deep immersion play is the other side of D&D, and 4th ed needs to cater well to this, yet not punish too hard players who occasionally lack imagination.

From what I can see, the idea of making it easier for players to keep adventuring for a while, more resources so you get more encounters before PC's in serious danger, is a good one. 1st level wizards who can shoot SOME form of magic continuously, even if weaker than sword blows? great. Same with per encounter powers: the one huge flaw with warblades was they got good powers back far too quickly and easily. Per encounter and per day powers go a long way to fixing that.

I will get first 3, do comparisons, test them both at low, medium, high, before I have a verdict about getting any more.

I have 6 ft of books though, as in stack would be 6ft high, so I might be too accepting of supplements and edition changes.

I have only beginner 2nd ed stuff though: I did hear 2nd ed was overloaded and flawed, but did not get much chance to fairly compare them. Same with early 1st ed, when Elf and Dwarf were actual classes: only beginner stuff.

Bring on 4th ed for judgement!

JadedDM
2007-12-21, 12:20 PM
Producing a deliberately flawed product is a terrible idea. Why? Because we won't buy it, and then there won't be a 4.5e because you went bankrupt. If 4e sucks, then no one should buy it, you should not care that WotC will go belly up, and you should purchase other high-quality products with your money instead.

Yeah, but you also openly admit 3E is a flawed system, right? Yet everyone (including you) originally bought it? Even WotC admits it is flawed and actually spend a lot of time convincing you how bad it is (lolGrapple), especially compared to the pure awesomeness of the upcoming 4E.

So, assuming history repeats itself, even if 4E is a flawed product, lots and lots of people are still going to buy it anyway, yes?

Artanis
2007-12-21, 12:30 PM
I played WoW for years, and the only similarity between it and what's been said about 4e that jumps out for me is the fact that they're making Fighters (and other stabby types) not suck. They're giving them options beyond "I hit it with a stick", options that are very blatantly not magic, but that can hold their own against a spell-slinger. And frankly, doing that is, in my opinion, a good idea...and just because somebody's already used an idea doesn't automatically make it bad.

Fhaolan
2007-12-21, 01:53 PM
OK, how to say this best...

Is there any way to make D&D as a non-cyclical product? I see a lot of people saying that all the books and other material is all played out, although I don't really buy that. (Pun not intended! :smallbiggrin: )

Look at it this way: Monopoly has been around in many forms for how many DECADES? It's a solid ruleset, not too many exploitable mechanics, sells steadily, makes it's publisher a solid, steady profit. Is there a way to make a balanced, relativly non-rules exploitable version of the game, and leave it "as is" for a while?

And yeah, I know the games companies have done several major make overs for many of the "old saw" games, and to good effect. But that was done to make those games "play faster," while D&D has always been about playing for four hours to several days.

Interesting question. Don't mind me here, I'm just typing 'out loud' so to speak, as I think this one through. :smallsmile:

It's true that board games in the style of Monopoly, Risk, etc. are more steady money-makers than RPGs. How does that work? Well... in my opinion it's due to cost, simplicity, broader appeal, and no continuity.

Cost: The basic Monopoly set has a list price of $12 (US dollars, according to Parker Brothers' website). That's it. The branded versions cost anywhere up to $40. There are no expansions, although there are alternate versions. The Player's Handbook, DM's Handbook, and the Monster Manual have list prices of $30 each (US dollars, according to Amazon.com. Currently I see them at $20 each due to special offers (probably because of the 4th edition announcement), but the list price is $30) because it costs a *lot* more to produce one of those books than a Monopoly set due to increased art, writing, and editing costs. Also, books tend to be more expensive to print than most board games. That's $90 and you're still not done. Either the DM will need to put a *lot* of work to product a viable campaign, or he needs to buy modules, campaign settings, and there's always the splatbooks. Has anyone ever totaled up what an entire 3.5 ruleset actually costs? I haven't, but I'm sure it's insane compared to $12 for a Monopoly set. There have been 'entry' D&D products that cost a lot less than $90, I think there was a 3.5 version, but the name of it escapes me. However, they were marketed very specifically as Entry sets, not Complete sets. That discourages a lot of people as they want to buy a game, not the beginning of a game. Also, there's expectation for cost: The expectation around board games is that a $90 board game is a *damned* impressive board game, in a huge box with lots of pieces. The visual impact of $90 of RPG is a lot less, and that means a lot to the general public.

Simplicity: You have a set of Monopoly? Cool. You're done. It fits up on a shelf somewhere and gets brought down in it's entirety. If you need to transport it, it's a simple box that's easy to carry. You don't need a semi to move your copy of the ruleset. The rules aren't expanded to the point of absurdity, there's no rule-lawyers, grognards, or other 'I know this trival piece of rule that allows me to hit a win button.' Your options are extremely limited, and it doesn't require a referee. Successful board games with the most expansion sets are still orders of operation smaller in size than most RPGs. While you can play RPGs without an encyclopedic knowledge of the ruleset, it is discouraged by other gamers, forums, and other venues.

Broader Appeal: RPGs appeal to nerds, geeks, and dweebs. They *require* an interest in fantasy/sci-fi, and appeal to those who want a game more 'challenging' and more 'intelligent' than a simple board game. Monopoly, on the other hand, doesn't really require an interest in capitalism or finance. All it requires is a desire for competition.

Continuity: Here's where something actually becomes an RPG versus other games. You have a character, which over time can change, improve and become more powerful. You play *many* sessions with that character, hopefully, and the game has to challenge and entertain throughout that continuity. Board games, however, are played over and over again, and continuity between games is not maintained. It's not like you slowly build up your fortune over several months of playing Monopoly. You play for a couple of hours at most, and then when you're done, you pack up. When you play again, you start from the begining. The game doesn't need to adapt to you getting more gear, more money, every session. It doesn't need the Trump expansion once you've gotten to Name level in your Monopoly, or a Gates expansion where you add in virtual properties with the variant Internet Auction rules....

Turning D&D into a static moneymaker like Monopoly, while an interestng idea, will be more chaotic and contriversial in my opinion than the cyclic system we have now. There's a lot of... pressure to keep the cyclic system, far more than the resistance against it.

Crow
2007-12-21, 04:45 PM
Incidentally Mr. "I am waiting on Wizards to provide some crunchy information regarding 4e before I decide if it is an improvement over 3.5." Crow, I got my "purchased advertising" as you call it. It is the designer's journals, including playtesting, mechanical insights, and why they changed this and that, along with a lot of good artwork. I think it is useful to know what the designers were thinking when they did this or that, why they chose one thing over another and what their intentions were in designing a certain power or feature.

Too bad 3.5 lacked books like these. A lot of arguements of RAW vs. RAI might have been avoided.

Plus, I like looking at cool fantasy artwork. Good thing good old Gary and Co. at TSR never did anything like this, you would have stopped playing AD&D a long time ago!

See also: The Art of Dragonlance, The Art of AD&D etc. Original retail prices ~$30+

Compared to "purchased advertising" (AKA half designer journal, half art book) price ~$15

WotC is so EVIL! Gary just wanted us to buy art that was already on the books we have already purchased and pay 30 bucks for it...

As an aside, accoding to the Inflation Calculator (http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl), $30 in 1985 is equivalent to almost $60 today.

But don't let me stop your perfectly good hyperbolic invective.

Sounds like I struck a nerve. My mistake.

Reel On, Love
2007-12-21, 04:54 PM
Sounds like I struck a nerve. My mistake.

That happens when you dissolve a strawman in vitriol like it's absolute fact.

Lord_Kimboat
2007-12-21, 05:21 PM
I think it might be a little helpful to get some perspective here. I've heard a lot of rumours and heresay about what 4e will be like but I'm not seeing much in the way of hard information. There are a lot of things that can be changed before release or a number of things that can be misunderstood.

For example, one thing I heard early on was that 4e is going to be more for online gaming than not, to the extent that people were beginning to ask if you needed a computer to play 4e and can you play it on a table-top. I then heard that there was a retraction from WotC saying that the just wanted to show that it 'Could' be played well online but that table-top would remain the normal method.

I freely admit that I neither heard the initial comment nor the retraction first hand.

My suggestion is that we all take a back step, keep playing 3.5 and wait until 4e comes out. Wait again until some of the braver souls decide to beta test it for us and then make a decision. If it's good, go ahead and buy, if you don't like it, stay with 3.5.

Simple. :smallwink:

Titanium Dragon
2007-12-21, 05:59 PM
Saying that D&D is becoming too much like WoW is rather rediculous, though I'm sure many of you don't realize why.

Reality check: WoW is basically a Diablo 2 clone that they squeeze more money out of people with. Go look at Diablo 2, and it is a sequel to Diablo, but with a rather different format - Diablo 2 is much like a wilderness with dungeons in it, whereas Diablo is just basically a single long, many-leveled dungeon. Sound familiar? It should.

Diablo is itself essentially an extension of the roguelike game; it disguises it in some ways, but it really is more or less a roguelike game, and the fact that you go to hell at the end of it makes the similarity all the more obvious. Roguelike games is a genre of games named after an ascii graphics game that started it all in the early 1980s called Rogue. In it, you were an adventurer who went down through a dungeon and fought your way to hell to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor.

And what was Rogue based on? Dungeons & Dragons. It was an adaptation of the Dungeons & Dragons system to the computer, a very, very early one and one that people often miss.

Thus, ultimately, World of Warcraft IS Dungeons & Dragons on some level. Complaining about Dungeons & Dragons being too much like World of Warcraft is silly because World of Warcraft itself is based on Dungeons & Dragons, the two should be fairly similar. And if World of Warcraft came up with an innovation which would be good for Dungeons & Dragons, then why not steal it?

horseboy
2007-12-21, 06:58 PM
Thus, ultimately, World of Warcraft IS Dungeons & Dragons on some level. Complaining about Dungeons & Dragons being too much like World of Warcraft is silly because World of Warcraft itself is based on Dungeons & Dragons, the two should be fairly similar. And if World of Warcraft came up with an innovation which would be good for Dungeons & Dragons, then why not steal it?
"Why do paladins get a free mount?"
"Because they do in D&D."

Renegade Paladin
2007-12-22, 02:40 AM
Because gnomes suck and must die.
That aside, gnomes are not iconic in any way, not popular, and not consistent. Mechanical tinkerers, illusionists, bards that talk to badgers... the gnomes have never had a consistent flavor or archetype, when all the other races do.
Plus the last time I saw someone play a gnome was months ago. If you don't count Whisper Gnomes (which you shouldn't, they don't have the problem regular gnomes do), over a year. If you don't count "for comedic value", a bad reason for a race, I don't even remember. Tieflings and Grey Elves from the MM certainly get a lot more play than gnomes in my experience.
Okay, let's strip away the bull here.
The depiction of gnomes isn't stereotypically racist enough, so it sucks and must die.
There, that's better. I find it's a lot easier on everybody to just say what you mean rather than beat around the bush to no point or purpose.

Because that's their new default, rather than the "generic but not" blandly flavored Greyhawk.
They're not wrecking all of their campaign settings; Eberron, AFAIK, is fine. They're "wrecking" the Forgotten Realms because that happens every so often. Hey, remember the whole Time of Troubles thing? This is like that.
No, it really isn't. The Time of Troubles, at the end of things, didn't plunge Faerun into a low-magic dark age. They are by all accounts altering the setting so as to be unrecognizable. You know what? They have Ravenloft for that.


To make them make more sense? There was virtually no difference between demons and devils save that the former were nominally more orderly and lawful.
What, so you need your monsters color-coded? Dragons were already bad enough.


They're focusing on making the new edition good, not on compatibility. You know what you're supposed to say to the players? "Let's finish this campaign. Next one we start up, we can use 4E." I can't imagine converting a whole campaign from 2E to 3E anyway, and I don't know anyone who did so.
Then you don't know a lot of gamers, I can only presume; I know several people who converted campaigns over after the last edition change.


That's not what they're doing. They ARE killing a lot of sacred cows that weren't actually good for the game.
What they're doing is designing the new edition... well, not quite from scratch, but only with an eye on the old one, rather than on its foundation.
No, I'll tell you what was bad for the game: CoDzilla, broken spell combos, the disparity of power between two-handed weapons and every other fighting style in the game, overly long feat trees that are impossible to get to the end of without sinking all your feats, broken spells in general, Power Attack/Leap Attack/Shock Trooper cheese, and general power creep. Know what all of 3e's problems have in common? They're purely mechanical. That's all that needed to change; what they're doing is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and they're doing so intentionally.

Talic
2007-12-22, 02:58 AM
A new edition is like reinventing yourself. Stars do it all the time (Madonna, anyone?) It allows you to try to sell to a new audience.

Consider the following scenario: A new player joins a group of veterans. The players show him the PHb, and tell him to get cracking, after explaining the basics of the game. He makes a decent character for core. Meanwhile, one of the veterans is complaining cause he can't make his Beguiler, because there's less books available. Or the new guy's too far behind the power curve to have fun. Or the new guy feels like someone just made his character for him, and doesn't really feel it's his.

With a lot of source material comes a lot of choices, and that's one of the chief turn offs for new players... Being confused. Revamping the rules puts everyone on the same level, removes most of the initial choice variety, and lets everyone start fresh. The downside is that it'll fail if most of the old base thinks it's counterintuitive or confusing.

Reel On, Love
2007-12-22, 03:19 AM
Okay, let's strip away the bull here.
There, that's better. I find it's a lot easier on everybody to just say what you mean rather than beat around the bush to no point or purpose.
Wow, you can quote me to say things I didn't. I'm impressed.
No, that's not what I meant. What I meant was that gnomes didn't have any kind of niche. They talk about this in the Races and Classes designer-notes booklet I read through today:
Fantasy races--including fantasy humans--need some kind of overarching, general flavor. Not all members have to fit that flavor, there can be different cultures, but there should be an overall flavor--otherwise they might as well be "they're-all-different" humans and there's no point in having them. For humans, that flavor has long since been "ambitious and adaptable". Dwarves have their own, elves have their own, etc. Gnomes... not so much. The races need a *point*, even if that point is just "let people play cool dragon-like things, since a lot of people really dig that because they think dragons are awesome" like it more or less is with the 4E Dragonborn.
Gnomes don't have anything. They're a freaky halfling-elf-dwarf hybrid. The 3.5 PHB pegs gnomes, overall, as "inquisitive, fun-loving inventor types". This doesn't resonate because it doesn't jibe with 3E gnomes or 2E gnomes or anything else. The closest the gnomes have to a point is the Dragonlance-style tinkerers... and doing that WOULD be getting too close to WoW (and introduce technological elements that are neither popular nor fit well).
Plus, gnomes suck.
Gnomes aren't one of the PHB player races because there's no *point* to gnomes. The other 4E races? They have a point. It's broad, and you can work with it or go against it, but the races have overall contexts (campaign settings can create cultures for them--Eberron gnomes, for example, have a cool culture... but not a broad context the way elves and dwarves do).


No, it really isn't. The Time of Troubles, at the end of things, didn't plunge Faerun into a low-magic dark age. They are by all accounts altering the setting so as to be unrecognizable. You know what? They have Ravenloft for that.
Faerun isn't, as far as I know, hitting a low-magic dark age (it's hard to call something where spellcasters can do their thing at will low-magic). I flipped briefly through that "Transitions" Drizzt novel, and there was a wizard-type flinging fireballs around without running out. Magic is changing. The setting is changing. It's changing more than during the Time of Troubles because the edition difference is bigger than the previous one.


What, so you need your monsters color-coded? Dragons were already bad enough.
Eyeroll. No, I just think that maybe creatures that are basically the embodiment of alignments that are opposites on one axis shouldn't be pretty much indistinguishable and interchangeable. Why bother having the two types, if you're doing that?
The celestial outsiders have this problem, too, and hopefully they'll be working on that.


Then you don't know a lot of gamers, I can only presume; I know several people who converted campaigns over after the last edition change.
Considering the AD&D ruleset, I really don't see converting to 4E as taking too much more work than converting an entire campaign to 3E from 2E.


No, I'll tell you what was bad for the game: CoDzilla, broken spell combos, the disparity of power between two-handed weapons and every other fighting style in the game, overly long feat trees that are impossible to get to the end of without sinking all your feats, broken spells in general, Power Attack/Leap Attack/Shock Trooper cheese, and general power creep. Know what all of 3e's problems have in common? They're purely mechanical. That's all that needed to change; what they're doing is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and they're doing so intentionally.
Those were broken bits of the mechanics.
Many of those weren't fixable without deleting large swaths of source material, something that frankly isn't possible. What do you think the reaction would be to "oh, yeah, so we're taking half the PHB back. Here, use this instead"? How would they even begin to find suitable replacements? Balancing CoDzilla and All Of The Spells In D&D isn't easy, and neither is making feats work better (when there isn't even consensus in the mechanics as to what the power level of a feat should BE). If it was so easy, it'd already be homebrewed (instead, homebrewed fixes vary wildly and the vast majority fall far short).
And why spend so much time on that--and balancing all of 3.5 WOULD take time that's at least comparable to making 4E--when you can start from a better design, not patch a poor one?

D&D has a lot of design problems. The feats thing? That's a design problem. Both Alertness and Darkstalker, say, are prerequisite-less feats, with a total difference in scale; one is way too minor, while the other is basically game-altering (since it changes how Hide interacts with other abilities). 4E is fixing that, by determining how feats should work: they have tiers, they should all be within a certain power range, they're getting rid of long feat trees (in favor of immediate benefits).

They're also fixing the "dead levels" design issue. Druids get something at almost every level, whereas Sorcerers get two class features: Spellcasting and a Familiar. That's it. One of the goals of 4E is to have characters get something at every level, because that's more fun during play.

CoDzilla is a design issue--either you're spamming heals and doing nothing else, or you're smashing things. CoDzilla is a redesign of 2E clerics, and 4E clerics are going to work differently; the Races and Classes book suggested that a 4E cleric wouldn't typically spend more than one standard action actively healing others during a fight. Instead, they're designed to act offensively--and those offensive abilities, since they're going to be used all the time, are going to be weighed against those of other classes.


3E's problems are FAR from purely mechanical. The four-encounters-per-day balance "guideline"? That's crap, and that's not just a flawed instance of a mechanic. The way traps work? Same. The way spellcasting classes and non-spellcasting classes stack up, and the way classes with fixed spell lists stack up to open-ended ones (like the wizard, or even the access-to-the-whole-list-daily cleric and druid) is, too.
The tons of conditions that need different, specific spells to get rid of them? Design problem. "Spellcasters should die at low levels and pwnzor at high ones?" You guessed it. All those role-supplanting abilities (like Wild Shape + buffs)? Design.

Renegade Paladin
2007-12-22, 04:22 AM
Wow, you can quote me to say things I didn't. I'm impressed.
No, that's not what I meant. What I meant was that gnomes didn't have any kind of niche. They talk about this in the Races and Classes designer-notes booklet I read through today:
Fantasy races--including fantasy humans--need some kind of overarching, general flavor. Not all members have to fit that flavor, there can be different cultures, but there should be an overall flavor--otherwise they might as well be "they're-all-different" humans and there's no point in having them. For humans, that flavor has long since been "ambitious and adaptable". Dwarves have their own, elves have their own, etc. Gnomes... not so much. The races need a *point*, even if that point is just "let people play cool dragon-like things, since a lot of people really dig that because they think dragons are awesome" like it more or less is with the 4E Dragonborn.
Gnomes don't have anything. They're a freaky halfling-elf-dwarf hybrid. The 3.5 PHB pegs gnomes, overall, as "inquisitive, fun-loving inventor types". This doesn't resonate because it doesn't jibe with 3E gnomes or 2E gnomes or anything else. The closest the gnomes have to a point is the Dragonlance-style tinkerers... and doing that WOULD be getting too close to WoW (and introduce technological elements that are neither popular nor fit well).
Plus, gnomes suck.
Did you seriously just say elves have a defined niche?

You did.

Wow.

There's just one thing to say to that: AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Seriously, best joke I've heard all day. :smalltongue:

Anyway, yes, it is what you meant, because it's what you said. And you just said it again, only you were more verbose about it. The races have to be pigeonholed or there's no point? That's a... bizarre viewpoint, I have to say.

Gnomes aren't one of the PHB player races because there's no *point* to gnomes. The other 4E races? They have a point. It's broad, and you can work with it or go against it, but the races have overall contexts (campaign settings can create cultures for them--Eberron gnomes, for example, have a cool culture... but not a broad context the way elves and dwarves do).
Sure there's a point. It is this: People have been playing gnomes since the advent of D&D. They have a defined culture (or better yet, several different ones) in every established campaign setting; that it varies from setting to setting is a good thing, not a bad one. What, is Lantan going to suddenly sink into the sea now? The Storm Horn mountain range collapse on top of the gnome villages in the mountain passes? Quite frankly, racist (or speciesist, I suppose) stereotype aside, it's flat boring to be able to tell exactly what the dwarves/halflings/orcs/etc in any given campaign setting are going to be like before even reading it, yet that's exactly what you can do, and easily. If 4e is going to make that situation worse as a conscious design decision, then that's another mark in the growing negative column for it. (And as I pointed out above, elves have absolutely no consistent racial theme whatsoever; they're outdoorsmen; arcane scholars; ancient, serious to the point of grim beings who bear haunted memories of the ancient past; fruity, carefree woodland creatures cavorting in the moonlight; aloof isolationists; commingling with all the other races; and a hundred other conflicting parts besides. By your logic, they should be eliminated. But they're not, and I'm glad, because it's good for an entire race to not be pigeonholed into one archetype. Sadly, rather than eliminating elves, it appears that they're simply pigeonholing them, but I'll take what I can get.)


Faerun isn't, as far as I know, hitting a low-magic dark age (it's hard to call something where spellcasters can do their thing at will low-magic). I flipped briefly through that "Transitions" Drizzt novel, and there was a wizard-type flinging fireballs around without running out. Magic is changing. The setting is changing. It's changing more than during the Time of Troubles because the edition difference is bigger than the previous one.
What are you on about? The Weave is being destroyed; that effectively ends all magic in Faerun that doesn't come directly from Shar.


Eyeroll. No, I just think that maybe creatures that are basically the embodiment of alignments that are opposites on one axis shouldn't be pretty much indistinguishable and interchangeable. Why bother having the two types, if you're doing that?
The celestial outsiders have this problem, too, and hopefully they'll be working on that.
You bother having two types because they serve the different alignments. That neither one is uniformly humanoid is not any sort of problem. If you can't tell the difference out of character you're not paying attention; if you can't tell it in character then GOOD, because I as the DM don't need that kind of metagaming.


Considering the AD&D ruleset, I really don't see converting to 4E as taking too much more work than converting an entire campaign to 3E from 2E.
Not really. To convert to 4e from 3e you'd have to reinvent whole races and monsters and make up whole new mechanics for what was eliminated rather than replacing the old stats with the new and calling it good.


Those were broken bits of the mechanics.
Many of those weren't fixable without deleting large swaths of source material, something that frankly isn't possible. What do you think the reaction would be to "oh, yeah, so we're taking half the PHB back. Here, use this instead"? How would they even begin to find suitable replacements? Balancing CoDzilla and All Of The Spells In D&D isn't easy, and neither is making feats work better (when there isn't even consensus in the mechanics as to what the power level of a feat should BE). If it was so easy, it'd already be homebrewed (instead, homebrewed fixes vary wildly and the vast majority fall far short).
And why spend so much time on that--and balancing all of 3.5 WOULD take time that's at least comparable to making 4E--when you can start from a better design, not patch a poor one?

D&D has a lot of design problems. The feats thing? That's a design problem. Both Alertness and Darkstalker, say, are prerequisite-less feats, with a total difference in scale; one is way too minor, while the other is basically game-altering (since it changes how Hide interacts with other abilities). 4E is fixing that, by determining how feats should work: they have tiers, they should all be within a certain power range, they're getting rid of long feat trees (in favor of immediate benefits).

They're also fixing the "dead levels" design issue. Druids get something at almost every level, whereas Sorcerers get two class features: Spellcasting and a Familiar. That's it. One of the goals of 4E is to have characters get something at every level, because that's more fun during play.

CoDzilla is a design issue--either you're spamming heals and doing nothing else, or you're smashing things. CoDzilla is a redesign of 2E clerics, and 4E clerics are going to work differently; the Races and Classes book suggested that a 4E cleric wouldn't typically spend more than one standard action actively healing others during a fight. Instead, they're designed to act offensively--and those offensive abilities, since they're going to be used all the time, are going to be weighed against those of other classes.


3E's problems are FAR from purely mechanical. The four-encounters-per-day balance "guideline"? That's crap, and that's not just a flawed instance of a mechanic. The way traps work? Same. The way spellcasting classes and non-spellcasting classes stack up, and the way classes with fixed spell lists stack up to open-ended ones (like the wizard, or even the access-to-the-whole-list-daily cleric and druid) is, too.
The tons of conditions that need different, specific spells to get rid of them? Design problem. "Spellcasters should die at low levels and pwnzor at high ones?" You guessed it. All those role-supplanting abilities (like Wild Shape + buffs)? Design.
So redesign the mechanics. You just described a whole list of... mechanical balance issues. Gnomes were not a balance problem. Neither were erinyes. And I somehow don't see succubi being chaotic evil as a major balance issue either.

Reel On, Love
2007-12-22, 05:10 AM
Did you seriously just say elves have a defined niche?

You did.

Wow.

There's just one thing to say to that: AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Seriously, best joke I've heard all day. :smalltongue:

Anyway, yes, it is what you meant, because it's what you said. And you just said it again, only you were more verbose about it. The races have to be pigeonholed or there's no point? That's a... bizarre viewpoint, I have to say.
There's a huge difference between "pigeonholed" and "I has a flavor". If races weren't.

Elves had a niche, but have grown to have a whole bunch of them...
...which is why in 4E, they aren't going to have 20 types of elves and have them be both "wild woodland-dwellers" and "ivory-tower magic-users".

Without an overall flavor, the only difference between elves, dwarves, and gnomes would be lifespan, height, and stat bonuses (a lot of the racial abilities are derived from the flavor). So why do you have gnomes and halflings when both are just Short People? The only reason is "tradition", and that's not enough by itself to keep a race in the PHB, IMO.


Sure there's a point. It is this: People have been playing gnomes since the advent of D&D. They have a defined culture (or better yet, several different ones) in every established campaign setting; that it varies from setting to setting is a good thing, not a bad one. What, is Lantan going to suddenly sink into the sea now? The Storm Horn mountain range collapse on top of the gnome villages in the mountain passes?
No, gnomes still exist... they're just not a PC option in the PHB (I don't doubt that the MM will have an "as PC" entry for gnomes). They're not popular and there's no point to them; no reason to have them in the PHB.

All races have cultures that vary from setting to setting... and they do this while having, at the very least, default archetypes.


Quite frankly, racist (or speciesist, I suppose) stereotype aside, it's flat boring to be able to tell exactly what the dwarves/halflings/orcs/etc in any given campaign setting are going to be like before even reading it, yet that's exactly what you can do, and easily. If 4e is going to make that situation worse as a conscious design decision, then that's another mark in the growing negative column for it. (And as I pointed out above, elves have absolutely no consistent racial theme whatsoever; they're outdoorsmen; arcane scholars; ancient, serious to the point of grim beings who bear haunted memories of the ancient past; fruity, carefree woodland creatures cavorting in the moonlight; aloof isolationists; commingling with all the other races; and a hundred other conflicting parts besides. By your logic, they should be eliminated. But they're not, and I'm glad, because it's good for an entire race to not be pigeonholed into one archetype. Sadly, rather than eliminating elves, it appears that they're simply pigeonholing them, but I'll take what I can get.)
Elves had a racial theme; they got... overexposed. 4E is making elves less scattered and eliminating subraces (instead having cultural differences), while presenting an overall default archetype for elves. This is good.


What are you on about? The Weave is being destroyed; that effectively ends all magic in Faerun that doesn't come directly from Shar.
If the Weave is being destroyed, it is obviously being reconstructed or replaced, because 4E has arcane magic, and 4E FR (as seen in that Drizzt novel) has non-Shadow-Weave arcanists.



You bother having two types because they serve the different alignments. That neither one is uniformly humanoid is not any sort of problem. If you can't tell the difference out of character you're not paying attention; if you can't tell it in character then GOOD, because I as the DM don't need that kind of metagaming.
Or you could just have "demons", who serve Evil, and have different types of those rather than nearly-identical but warring distinct types of evil outsiders. As is, their overall behaviors are remarkably similar. If they embody Lawful Evil and Chaotic Evil, they should be substantially different, and what they serve should be reflected; instead, many evil outsiders have no rhyme or reason to them.


Not really. To convert to 4e from 3e you'd have to reinvent whole races and monsters and make up whole new mechanics for what was eliminated rather than replacing the old stats with the new and calling it good.
To convert to 3E from 2E you had to reinvent monsters and adapt mechanics. With 4E, you just find the closest mechanic; with 3E, you picked one for stuff you might have handwaved before. One of the goals of 4E, incidentally, is to make designing things for it easier, just as 3E did compared to 2E: the simplified monster stat blocks reflect this. Got to make up a monster? Shouldn't be too hard.


So redesign the mechanics. You just described a whole list of... mechanical balance issues. Gnomes were not a balance problem. Neither were erinyes. And I somehow don't see succubi being chaotic evil as a major balance issue either.
Uh? First of all, you can't just redesign the mechanics.
Second of all, no, I didn't just list balance issues, and the balance issues I talked about stemmed from design issues, i.e. feats didn't have a consistent design. Creating a design and then altering all existing feats to fit it sounds like a crappy idea.

Things like dead levels, players feeling like they need to have/be a "healbot", the four-encounter-per-day balance mechanic, traps not being any fun and requiring a specific class, these are all design issues.
I mean, c'mon. Let's say 3.5 was redesigned to have balanced classes without dead levels, to not rely on four encounters per day for balancing, to have feats be gained more often, have a much tighter power range, and not have long feat trees, to have classes like clerics and bards spend more actions doing stuff themselves and fewer actions letting others do stuff, and so on...
...why, you'd basically have 4E. But you'd have a 4E with leftover 3.5 mechanics, with uncertain 3.5 design goals, and the like. A new edition allows much neater mechanics, lets them kill some sacred cows that aren't good for the game (I bet you won't see leftover crap like the bag of holding/portable hole thing, say), an overall lets them set out their goals and then approach them clearly and directly, rather than twisting existing mechanics.
Speaking of which, look at the amount of dissatisfaction with 4E--you think the reaction to WotC going "half of your books don't apply anymore. Erase'em. Here, us all this instead" would be better? There's a reason they haven't actually *killed* Polymorph, or *removed* Natural Spell, or said "the Shapechange variant for druids is now the official class, ignore the PHB". They can't do that. And not only that, they can't put in that amount of work (about equivalent to 4E, really) for no profit, so you'd just have the same outcry about "3.75" as you do about 4E.

Renegade Paladin
2007-12-22, 09:42 AM
No profit? Don't make me laugh; they have their fanbase by the nose. I'm beginning to think they actively try to make really bad products just to see if people will still buy them, and they still do. The only question is whether 4e will be the limit.

Anyway, something I forgot in the above ranting: Who decided to make tieflings a core race? And to do so while leaving aasimar out in the cold? Talk about stupid design decisions. :smallyuk:

Reel On, Love
2007-12-22, 09:46 AM
No profit? Don't make me laugh; they have their fanbase by the nose. I'm beginning to think they actively try to make really bad products just to see if people will still buy them, and they still do. The only question is whether 4e will be the limit.
That kind of thought is puerile. Obviously they don't (and the late 3.5 stuff has been good--ToB, the MIC, and so on), and 4E doesn't look bad. Check out that Races and Classes booklet at your local store; the designers explain themselves and do it well.

What I was talking about was your suggestion that WotC fix 3.5 rather than make 4E. Either they fix it up and charge for it ("3.75"), in which case there's a huge uproar about how OMG THEY JUST WANT MONEYS and THEY CAN'T SAY HALF MY BOOK IS INVALID I PAID GOOD MONEY FOR THAT, or they *don't* charge for it... in which case they put in thousands of man-hours for zero return on investment.

I'm not sure what exactly it is you WANT, really. It seems to be a perfect version of 3.5 (which apparently has no design flaws, just mechanical ones) served up on a silver platter for free.


Anyway, something I forgot in the above ranting: Who decided to make tieflings a core race? And to do so while leaving aasimar out in the cold? Talk about stupid design decisions. :smallyuk:
Someone who noticed how damn popular tieflings are? I don't really care for them, but you can't argue with success. I've definitely seen a whole lot more Tiefling PCs than, say, gnomes. The Aasimar isn't nearly as popular, because they're just "look, I'm a little shiny"; the Tieflings have the whole bad-boy/girl thing going on.

Mr. Friendly
2007-12-22, 09:50 AM
No profit? Don't make me laugh; they have their fanbase by the nose. I'm beginning to think they actively try to make really bad products just to see if people will still buy them, and they still do. The only question is whether 4e will be the limit.

Anyway, something I forgot in the above ranting: Who decided to make tieflings a core race? And to do so while leaving aasimar out in the cold? Talk about stupid design decisions. :smallyuk:

The first part of that is really paranoid and borderline delusional. You would have to be willing to plausably accept that this huge staff of people designing the game, most of whom have been playing D&D for most of their lives, are sitting around cackling somewhere, pursing their fingers and cackling maniacally about what sort of built in flaws they can create.

Sorry, I take it on face value that most of these people love D&D as much as I do and that they, from both a personal and professional standpoint, want to create the best product they possibly can.

As to the second part, Chris Perkins answers that on page 48 of Races and Classes. It's to fill a niche. That niche is a race that is "evil-esque"; so you can have a character that is "evil curious" without actually crossing the line into evil. He likens it to leather clad biker gangs from old 50s movies. They are there for the "rebel" characters who want to be different.

lawful_evil
2007-12-22, 11:42 AM
My experience, having started back with first edition, was that "they" keep releasing books, adding flavor and complexity to the fantasy world. At some point there is so much extra 'crap' that it is too complex and there are too many special things to keep things balanced.

They release a new edition and get back to the basic(and adjust the core rules a bit). Then they begin adding in more and more crap again.

Wash, Rinse, Repeat. Each time they do it I'm hopeful they include all that crap, incorporated and balanced into the system in the initial release, but no, they never do. The new monster manuals never include the contents of all those add-ons from the previous edition.

People just can't keep up. Aside from financial costs, it takes a long time to read all of the books and understand all of the rules(especially if you have a preconception of how something works from a previous edition).

horseboy
2007-12-22, 01:08 PM
Someone who noticed how damn popular tieflings are? I don't really care for them, but you can't argue with success. I've definitely seen a whole lot more Tiefling PCs than, say, gnomes. The Aasimar isn't nearly as popular, because they're just "look, I'm a little shiny"; the Tieflings have the whole bad-boy/girl thing going on.

Tieflings had whole conventions dedicated to them? I didn't know that. No, my money says the real reason they got rid of gnomes was because of the Nackles.

Deepblue706
2007-12-22, 02:44 PM
I honestly don't mind Gnomes getting the boot from the PHB - I can just houserule until I get the MM. But, what upsets me is the popularity of the Tiefling (and the fact it is taking a front-row seat as a race choice). I dislike the Dragonborn concept as well. But then, I suppose I never liked "exotic" races, as they always seemed to be designed to cater to those who need to have more "flashy" things in their games. I can only hope that their efforts on implementing "cooler" material do not lead them to detract from making truly well-written material.

From the looks of the Elf Fluff preview, I don't believe I will be fully satisfied.

But that's okay, I can just homebrew and houserule away!

Hopefully, I won't have to say that many more times...

Titanium Dragon
2007-12-22, 09:53 PM
Many of those weren't fixable without deleting large swaths of source material, something that frankly isn't possible. What do you think the reaction would be to "oh, yeah, so we're taking half the PHB back. Here, use this instead"? How would they even begin to find suitable replacements? Balancing CoDzilla and All Of The Spells In D&D isn't easy, and neither is making feats work better (when there isn't even consensus in the mechanics as to what the power level of a feat should BE). If it was so easy, it'd already be homebrewed (instead, homebrewed fixes vary wildly and the vast majority fall far short).

Oh, there's an easy way to fix the system; it involves completely removing and remaking the spell lists. That's why few people do it; it is a lot of work. It is a fundamental flaw in the system, though, and it is fixable - but its fix is to change the system considerably, narrowing what a particular spellcaster can do with magic.


As to the second part, Chris Perkins answers that on page 48 of Races and Classes. It's to fill a niche. That niche is a race that is "evil-esque"; so you can have a character that is "evil curious" without actually crossing the line into evil. He likens it to leather clad biker gangs from old 50s movies. They are there for the "rebel" characters who want to be different.

I think it is an absolutely abominable idea. First off, there's nothing to stop you from being evil, but more importantly, I think that having a real race with evil tendencies that made its way through the world would be far more interesting. Instead they just copped out.

I think the REAL issue is that the existing races ARE just humans in funny suits; this is a flaw to a lot of fantasy. I think more alilen races are a good thing, not a bad one, and teiflings are just another human in a funny suit.

Renegade Paladin
2007-12-23, 10:28 AM
That kind of thought is puerile. Obviously they don't (and the late 3.5 stuff has been good--ToB, the MIC, and so on), and 4E doesn't look bad. Check out that Races and Classes booklet at your local store; the designers explain themselves and do it well.

What I was talking about was your suggestion that WotC fix 3.5 rather than make 4E. Either they fix it up and charge for it ("3.75"), in which case there's a huge uproar about how OMG THEY JUST WANT MONEYS and THEY CAN'T SAY HALF MY BOOK IS INVALID I PAID GOOD MONEY FOR THAT, or they *don't* charge for it... in which case they put in thousands of man-hours for zero return on investment.

I'm not sure what exactly it is you WANT, really. It seems to be a perfect version of 3.5 (which apparently has no design flaws, just mechanical ones) served up on a silver platter for free.
No, I want them to fix the mechanics without wrecking the game. They somehow managed to call 3e a new edition without having to completely demolish all their fluff; they could have 4e without getting rid of gnomes, the outer planes, and everything else they're summarily sweeping away. I have absolutely no problem with the mechanical fixes they've presented so far. Having spellcasters roll to beat the target's save DC? Great. Combat options besides "I hit it again?" Great. None of the things they should be doing for a new edition require destroying existing game worlds.


Someone who noticed how damn popular tieflings are? I don't really care for them, but you can't argue with success. I've definitely seen a whole lot more Tiefling PCs than, say, gnomes. The Aasimar isn't nearly as popular, because they're just "look, I'm a little shiny"; the Tieflings have the whole bad-boy/girl thing going on.
What success? I've seen all of one tiefling player character in my entire gaming experience. He behaved predictably and my character axed him in the throat for it when he didn't so much cross the line as blow it up with a tactical nuke. Meantime I can think of half a dozen gnome PCs off the top of my head, and I've been in and run so many campaigns I don't remember all the characters anymore; I'm sure I could come up with more upon examining my notes.

As for aasimar, I've seen a few more of them than tieflings, but not so much as any of the 3e core races. But if you're going to have tieflings, where the hell's the counterbalance?

Crow
2007-12-23, 12:01 PM
Putting in Tieflings to fill an "evil-curious" niche is just absurd. Why is an entire race needed for players to explore this aspect of gameplay? Can't just about any character be "evil-curious"? (Which admittedly, I'm still not sure what this means) If somebody wants to play evil-lite, they are going to do it no matter what race they choose. More than likely, Tieflings are just going to end up being the new drow...

Maybe it is just me, but it seems like they are changing more fluff than they really need to in order to fix the system. Ideally, you should be able to fix the system without changing any of the fluff. If you want to change all the fluff, release a new campaign setting. I didn't mind Tieflings at all in their old incarnation (none of our players ever played one though)...Why change? Warforged are not something I like in my "default" D&D, and neither are Dragonborn. Supplements, campaign setting (Eberron, FR)? Fine. Default? No thank you.

horseboy
2007-12-23, 12:19 PM
What success? I've seen all of one tiefling player character in my entire gaming experience. He behaved predictably and my character axed him in the throat for it when he didn't so much cross the line as blow it up with a tactical nuke. Meantime I can think of half a dozen gnome PCs off the top of my head, and I've been in and run so many campaigns I don't remember all the characters anymore; I'm sure I could come up with more upon examining my notes.


You know, the more I think about it, the more it must have been the Nackle's fault. You're trying to run a con and practically everyone from Dyvvers shows up with a member of an extended family of small carnie folk. "My God, it's full of Phantasmal Killer."

Crow
2007-12-23, 12:23 PM
You know, the more I think about it, the more it must have been the Nackle's fault. You're trying to run a con and practically everyone from Dyvvers shows up with a member of an extended family of small carnie folk. "My God, it's full of Phantasmal Killer."

Oh yeah, well...you're...part horse and part boy. So there.

Azerian Kelimon
2007-12-23, 12:26 PM
Methinks I got the reason for Tieflings: The designers want a place to pour all of the "I'm from an evil race but I'm good and a monologuist" Drizzt clones into so that people can see 'em coming.

Moff Chumley
2007-12-23, 12:48 PM
I, personally, look forward to 4e. Yes, I have over $400 worth of books from 3.5e. No, I don't feel WotC 'owes it to me' to fix them. They write 'em, I pay for 'em. There were no promises of 'hey, these are perfectly balanced rules!', and I never assumed that they were. There's no such thing as perfectly balanced rules. As to the Tiefling/Dragonborn thing, I present to you two options: change fluff, or ignore until useful. There. Isn't that better? :smallsmile: :smallamused:

horseboy
2007-12-23, 01:06 PM
Oh yeah, well...you're...part horse and part boy. So there.

I'm just saying Dyvvers has a reputation for a wretched hive of scum and villainy for a reason. We're largely responsible for the printing of 3.5 for starters. Then we've got that Nackle Famly Reunion convention. And well, when you're at some other con and you find out someone else is playing a Nackle you get all excited and swap out for your Nackle and the next thing you know, you're setting up carnival rides.

SexyOchreJelly
2007-12-23, 01:14 PM
I personally will be staying at 3.5. My group agrees...

Besides, if they have created a new setting for 4e to take place in, I wouldn't want to explore it anyway, as I like Eberron the most. Perhaps Eberron will stay at 3.5...

Ah well, just means that when they stop making 3.5 books we won't have to buy anything from them anymore.

Lord_Kimboat
2007-12-23, 04:05 PM
I'm now beginning to feel a little alienated.

Making Teiflings a core race, creating a dragonborn race and now bringing drow in as a core race link. (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=67394)

4E is starting to look like 'Fanboy Central'. Only races that are 'cool' with the younger set are allowed in. I swear, if I could talk Salvatore into writing a trilogy with a cool, bad-a$$ Gnome in it, they would be back into 4e before I could blink.

tyckspoon
2007-12-23, 06:23 PM
I'm now beginning to feel a little alienated.

Making Teiflings a core race, creating a dragonborn race and now bringing drow in as a core race link. (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=67394)

4E is starting to look like 'Fanboy Central'. Only races that are 'cool' with the younger set are allowed in. I swear, if I could talk Salvatore into writing a trilogy with a cool, bad-a$$ Gnome in it, they would be back into 4e before I could blink.

I.. really don't understand these sentiments. Drow have been a playable race in some form since forever (and they're not being presented in Core, that is, the first set of PHB/DMG/MM. They're in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting.) Gnomes are going to be in the first Monster Manual and if they don't have a player race writeup there it will most likely be in the next PHB along with whichever current core class(es) they decided to take out. Removing something from the PHB doesn't mean it's out of the game, it's just not in the first released material.

Lex-Kat
2007-12-23, 06:27 PM
LMAO!!!!:smallbiggrin:

Lord_Kimboat
2007-12-23, 06:28 PM
It's simple concern Tyckspoon. I mostly play Living Greyhawk, and will probably be signing up to Living Forgotten Realms. I don't want to go to conventions where the tables I play at are mobbed by D'rizzt fanboys and adolescent gamers who's idea of good role play is to describe, in minute detail, how cool their character looks!

tyckspoon
2007-12-23, 06:54 PM
It's simple concern Tyckspoon. I mostly play Living Greyhawk, and will probably be signing up to Living Forgotten Realms. I don't want to go to conventions where the tables I play at are mobbed by D'rizzt fanboys and adolescent gamers who's idea of good role play is to describe, in minute detail, how cool their character looks!

I'm pretty sure the only way you would not have that problem is if Drow were never presented as a playable race anywhere (which would be highly unlikely, given the prominence Drow have in the Realms and in player's minds) or if the rules for Living Realms banned Drow PCs, in which case it wouldn't matter where they had been printed. Preventing obnoxious idiots from being obnoxious idiots is a futile task.

illathid
2007-12-23, 07:04 PM
Making Teiflings a core race, creating a dragonborn race and now bringing drow in as a core race link. (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=67394)


Just because they are talking about how Drow fit into the world does not mean that they are a core race. It could just mean that Drow have an entry in the MM on how to use them as a PC race. Kinda like how they do now.

EDIT: Ninja'd... kinda

Lord_Kimboat
2007-12-24, 12:48 AM
I don't know Illathid. This is what the article said.



Drow As Player Characters

With the release of the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting in the summer of of '08, drow will be presented as a fully playable character race. Although drow as a race are a singularly wicked people, cruel and treacherous in their dealings with others, a smattering in every generation learn cooperation and the value of alliance. While some of these are merely cunning in their decision to gain the trust of others, a few truly come to value the positive aspects of camaraderie and friendship, sometimes even with those not of their own race.

Play a drow if you …

* want to be good at skulking about, striking quick, and employing a variety of dirty tactics;
* ?enjoy playing a hero in search of redemption and who struggles to rise above the wickedness of his people;
* ?are considering a ranger, rogue, warlock.

illathid
2007-12-24, 01:26 AM
I don't know Illathid. This is what the article said.

Your missing the most important part of that qoute.


With the release of the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting in the summer of of '08, drow will be presented as a fully playable character race.

As in, they're a PC race in FR not in the core rulebooks Core.

Unless there making FR Core...

Oh... My... God...

Rich Baker must be stopped!

:smallwink:

Belteshazzar
2007-12-24, 01:37 AM
I have recently been simultaneously appeased and angered by the realization that they aren't scrapping gnomes or orcs, they are simply going to make you buy the expansion pack *excuse me* the other multiple 'players handbooks' to let you play the races you actually want. This is why we are getting oddballs like tiefling and dragonborn in the players handbook. Because, its only the first pack. In order to run the campaign world you really want to run, you are going to need at least 6 basic 'core' books in all per a group. That isn't even counting the redundant books each player will own.

Rachel Lorelei
2007-12-24, 01:42 AM
I have recently been simultaneously appeased and angered by the realization that they aren't scrapping gnomes, they are simply going to make you by the expansion pack *excuse me* the other players handbooks to let you play the races you want. This is why we are getting oddballs like tiefling and dragonborn in the players handbook. Because, its only the first pack. In order to run the campaign world you really want you are going to need at least 6 basic 'core' books in all per a group. That isn't even counting the redundant books each player will own.

Um, NO. They included the tiefling and the dragonborn because "glamorously evil-ish/angsty thingy" and "dragon-y thingy" are very popular choices.

Kompera
2007-12-24, 06:47 AM
Actually, it was falling down. Once you can find a legal, nonsupercheesy counter to the edition's most powerful cheese, it's done.

You mean a DM?


The problem with that line of reasoning, Nerd-o-rama, is that you're no longer playing D&D v3.5. You are instead playing your DMs game which is based on D&D v3.5. And I buy the rule books so that I can play the game, and not necessarily so that I can play someone else's game. If done correctly, a new edition can have us all playing the same game again.



Putting in Tieflings to fill an "evil-curious" niche is just absurd. Why is an entire race needed for players to explore this aspect of gameplay? Can't just about any character be "evil-curious"? (Which admittedly, I'm still not sure what this means) If somebody wants to play evil-lite, they are going to do it no matter what race they choose.I'm disappointed by this as well. They decided to remove the Half-Orc and the Half-Elf, and then made a race which could be described as a Half-Demon a Core race. Ok, it's more like a Sixteenth-Demon, but that's just a bit ridiculous as well. Why not just leave in the Half-Orc, a race which is just as easily seen as having an evil heritage?

Matthew
2007-12-24, 09:29 AM
The problem with that line of reasoning, Nerd-o-rama, is that you're no longer playing D&D v3.5. You are instead playing your DMs game which is based on D&D v3.5. And I buy the rule books so that I can play the game, and not necessarily so that I can play someone else's game. If done correctly, a new edition can have us all playing the same game again.

I would say that you're always playing your DM's game based on 3e, it only differs to what extent and in what direction. The sheer volume of optional rules available pretty much ensures that the rules are inconsistant between groups and over time.

Tren
2007-12-24, 01:22 PM
I'm disappointed by this as well. They decided to remove the Half-Orc and the Half-Elf, and then made a race which could be described as a Half-Demon a Core race. Ok, it's more like a Sixteenth-Demon, but that's just a bit ridiculous as well. Why not just leave in the Half-Orc, a race which is just as easily seen as having an evil heritage?

Because the kids don't want to play ugly boorish evil, they want to play sexy sinister evil. I can accept the tiefling as a core race, even if they're slightly exotic they've been a staple of D&D for some time. And it's been hinted at in places they have big changes in mind for "the race formerly known as aasimar" so they're not ignoring the other side of the planetouched equation.

illathid
2007-12-24, 10:58 PM
Because the kids don't want to play ugly boorish evil, they want to play sexy sinister evil. I can accept the tiefling as a core race, even if they're slightly exotic they've been a staple of D&D for some time. And it's been hinted at in places they have big changes in mind for "the race formerly known as aasimar" so they're not ignoring the other side of the planetouched equation.

Also, I think they're iffy on the whole idea of having an entire race being created through what essentially amounts to rape. Which was basically the whole idea behind half-orcs.

And before anyone asks how this isn't the case with tieflings, remember that the new tieflings don't necessarily have a demonic great-grandfather. Instead, they carry a physical stigma caused by their (Human) ancestors pact with infernal forces for power. So it's kinda like curse based which is passed down through bloodlines.

Snooder
2007-12-25, 05:18 AM
I'm disappointed by this as well. They decided to remove the Half-Orc and the Half-Elf, and then made a race which could be described as a Half-Demon a Core race. Ok, it's more like a Sixteenth-Demon, but that's just a bit ridiculous as well. Why not just leave in the Half-Orc, a race which is just as easily seen as having an evil heritage?

Because Half-Orcs and Half-Elves are mechanical flaws as races. Think about it, how often have you wondered if the children of Half-Orcs are Orcs, Human or Half-Orcs. Wouldn't it be weird if they were human, married other humans, then several generations down the line out popped a Half-Orc. And if they are Half-Orcs, then how long until the "1/15th" Orc just becomes human? This is ok for a PC but as the underpinnings of an entire race, problems occur. Not to mention how you create communities with such a volatile demographic.

With the newly refluffed Tiefling all these problems are solved. They are a single race that breeds true each generation. Children of Tieflings are always Tieflings. Maybe if they add in a "half-" template you can have sterile offspring if interbred with humans, but that's for later. Generally it just makes for a stronger design and less dead catgirls.

Snooder
2007-12-25, 05:20 AM
And it's been hinted at in places they have big changes in mind for "the race formerly known as aasimar" so they're not ignoring the other side of the planetouched equation.

Really? Links please.

I've personally been waiting and hoping for Aasimar to show up in the PHB as the counterparts to Tieflings. They're just so awesome, and perfect for a Paladin PC.

Cuddly
2007-12-25, 05:36 AM
http://www1.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/1321447/2/istockphoto_1321447_lots_of_cash.jpg

Renegade Paladin
2007-12-25, 11:12 AM
Really? Links please.

I've personally been waiting and hoping for Aasimar to show up in the PHB as the counterparts to Tieflings. They're just so awesome, and perfect for a Paladin PC.
Except not, because they're also, by all indications, going to destroy paladins.

Caewil
2007-12-25, 11:58 AM
Really? I had this silly idea that they wanted to keep them, but stop pigeonholing them into being LQ.

Roderick_BR
2007-12-25, 12:05 PM
(...) But, what upsets me is the popularity of the Tiefling (and the fact it is taking a front-row seat as a race choice). (...)
I foresee an avalanche of tieflings being created by players that wants to be new eeeebil guy. Kinda like when rules for Drow PCs came out.


(...)Also, I think they're iffy on the whole idea of having an entire race being created through what essentially amounts to rape. Which was basically the whole idea behind half-orcs.(...)
Now I had a mean idea for a new character. An half-orc barbarian, that claims that his parents are still together, and live in another town. And have an half-elf ranger being his half brother. The half-elf's mother still writes to their father once in a while.
Massive sanity checks to the players :smallbiggrin:

Renegade Paladin
2007-12-25, 12:18 PM
Really? I had this silly idea that they wanted to keep them, but stop pigeonholing them into being LQ.
Then they're not keeping them. They're making something else and appropriating the name. Paladins are lawful good, now and forever.

Woot Spitum
2007-12-25, 12:38 PM
If 4th edition does for D&D what saga edition did for the Star Wars RPG, then I'm in favor of it. I also like the idea of Tome of Battle stuff becoming core.

Thinker
2007-12-25, 12:44 PM
Then they're not keeping them. They're making something else and appropriating the name. Paladins are lawful good, now and forever.

Why is that? Is it because you have some preconception about what a paladin should and should not be? Does it destroy your gaming experience to have holy warriors from other causes without being the most evil of evil (blackguards)?

Renegade Paladin
2007-12-25, 12:53 PM
Why is that?
It's because I understand what the term means. I have no opposition to other alignments having holy warriors, but they are not paladins, because they do not personify chivalry nor are they necessarily heroic or noble. Call it something else.

Tren
2007-12-25, 01:43 PM
We’d already had the opportunity to “talk design” a bit in the Rules Compendium, and this was an even bigger and better forum to talk openly about our goals and hopes for the game. I mean, when there’s a section from Matt Sernett called “The Trouble with Gnomes” that flat-out tells you that we don’t know what we’re doing with them yet, or a confession from Rob Heinsoo that he’s got Plans (with a capital P) for the race-formerly-known-as-aasimar, you know you’re getting the words straight from R&D’s mouth. Or keyboard, as it were.

Aasimar still in the game, likely getting an overhaul in the same way as Tieflings.


As for half-orcs, we’re still discussing them. Speaking only for myself: I’ve played a half-orc and enjoyed it in the “Hulk smash” sort of mode. But the race intrinsically makes me uncomfortable due to its implied origins, and until that’s solved, I’m just as happy to see them left out for now. At the same time, I have absolutely no doubt that we can find a story that will allow us to update the half-orc with the same kind of reimagining that turned the tiefling from an oddity into a full-fledged race.

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/4spot/20071218a

For my part, I don't see any need to reimagine the half-orc, but I don't think they're interesting enough or high on most people's priorities for inclusion in the core rules. They tend to be very pigeonholed by most D&D settings into being rebel loners trying find their place, or evil killing machines. I don't really know of half-orcs in any fantasy literature, and I'm just not sure that they deserve a spot in the PHB. That said I do like half-orcs, and I think making them more rare would actually make them cooler, "By the gods, this evil tribal chieftain that's been stirring up the barbarians is actually a half-orc!" But I think the MM or a later PHB is the right place for them.

Lord_Kimboat
2007-12-28, 06:59 PM
It's because I understand what the term means. I have no opposition to other alignments having holy warriors, but they are not paladins, because they do not personify chivalry nor are they necessarily heroic or noble. Call it something else.

I heard rumor that alignment was also likely going by the wayside. I think this is one of the few things I see that I like about 4e. I haven't been able to find too many people to agree on what is or isn't evil - and some of the things I do see is ridiculous. A paladin, needing to get into the BBEGs lair has to get past two guards who are simply hired mercenaries. Unable to use a drug or poison to disable them, because that's Evil, he must simply murder them because they are doing their jobs, cutting them painfully with his sword - because that is the way good people act?:smallconfused: